Birth rates are falling almost everywhere in the world. In the medium and long term, experts predict that it will also fall in less affluent countries. This is a problem, but also the result of social emancipation movements. What can be done when even the current policy of incentives does not seem to be up to the challenge?
‘Cash for kids’ was the headline on the front page of The Economist a week ago, and the cover design showed a baby bottle full of coins. With a very precise and not at all flattering analysis, the prestigious business weekly addressed the issue of the falling birth rate and the measures being taken to tackle this global demographic winter, which is so much talked about because of its impact on the various national economies. In fact, our system of social and intergenerational solidarity is based on the existence of young active workers who, through their taxes, pay for the pensions and health care of those who have worked all their lives.
The birth rate is moving at two speeds
The birth rate is moving at two speeds It is true that the fertility rate is falling mainly in the richer countries, but it is expected to spread inexorably to the less affluent parts of the world at various stages. Looking further ahead, the global fertility rate (the number of children a woman has on average) will be 1.7 in 2100, while the population replacement level will be 2.1. But already by 2050, more than 2/3 of the world will be below this threshold, according to a scientific study published in The Lancet.
The problem is no longer confined to what we consider the epitome of the rich world, the so-called ‘West’. China and South Korea are already suffering badly. In Korea, the birth rate is at an all-time low of 0.7%, a figure that makes the pension system unsustainable when compared with the growing number of elderly people, especially if we take into account that Seoul has a very balanced public spending policy, with a ratio of public debt to total wealth production (the famous debt-to-GDP ratio) of less than 60%, the same target that even EU countries should achieve with their recovery plans, which include the always painful cuts in public spending. Even Beijing, which for more than half a century was considered the capital of the world’s fastest-growing country (to the extent that it applied the one-child policy from 1979 to 2013), has long been observing an inexorable trend of ageing and will soon have to manage a population of hundreds of millions of pensioners.
The situation in Europe
In our corner of Mediterranean Europe, the figures are no longer reassuring. In Italy and Spain, the population is falling; in Portugal, the situation is not much different, although there has recently been an interesting reversal: after the historic fall in 2021, the country closed 2022 with a 5% increase in births. With another interesting detail: in 2023, 1/5 of newborns were born to foreign mothers, a number that rises to 1/3 in the Lisbon metropolitan area and in the urban centers of the Algarve region (southern Portugal), a strong attraction for immigrants, who find work mainly in the hotel sector.
However, if these figures are undeniable in their cold mathematical essentiality, there are at least two misinterpretations that are often associated with the usual crunching of figures. The first mistake is that we should not automatically see the falling birth rate as a negative fact in itself. We cannot overlook the fact that the birth rate itself is the child of women’s emancipation. Wider access to education and the world of work, greater control over childbirth and, more generally, over one’s own body, and the consequent reduction in unwanted pregnancies, especially among adolescents, are all factors which, where these desirable objectives have been achieved, have led to a reduction in the birth rate. How, then, can we reverse a trend without eradicating its causes, which cannot be considered negative, unless we are talking about blindly anachronistic and reactionary public policies?
The policies of the most conservative countries, such as Hungary, show that they are capable of achieving a slight increase in the birth rate in the short term, but with poor future prospects and high present costs in terms of gender equality and migration policies, which contribute to a certain isolation of Budapest in relation to its own European partners. Not to mention the almost embarrassing creativity (also given the poor results) of some South Korean measures, such as municipal-funded blind dates, a kind of Tinder sponsored by mayors.
A possible solution
The impasse in this dilemma is exacerbated by the fact that even the most progressive public strategies, i.e. financing births in the form of family allowances (in particular the famous “cash for kids”) and other accompanying incentives (work permits, effective childcare, etc.), do not seem to work. The Scandinavian countries, classic examples of an inimitable welfare state, would demonstrate this: Sweden already has a fertility rate of 1.7%, which could affect the whole of humanity by 2100 and make everyone a bit afraid, while Norway’s is even slightly lower (1.5%).
At this point, The Economist reminds us that skilled immigration will undoubtedly solve the problem in the medium term, which the Portuguese figure seems to confirm. In the long term, however, as John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, joked, we will all be dead. And since it is precisely this unpleasant end of the human race that should be avoided, The Economist’s economists are confident of a future that is already somewhat present among us: new technologies and artificial intelligence could play in a hypothetical baby boom in the near future the role that household appliances played in the post-war baby boom.. Another famous 20th-century philosopher, Martin Heidegger, once said: ‘Only a God can save us now’, as the newspaper that interviewed him, Der Spiegel, titled the conversation. Today we suspect, with a mixture of hope and fear, that this God may be an algorithm
Complementary activity
Activity 1 – Would you be able, by researching online and other sources, to establish what the fertility rate is in your city of residence? Is it decreasing or increasing? Is it decreasing or increasing?
