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The global population is expected to continue increasing for another 60 years because of the improvements in life expectancy and because today’s young adults will have children. But this increase will be slowed by the decline in fertility, which has been significant for about 20 years, especially since 2015.
In 2021, the global total fertility rate (TFR) was 2.1 children per woman. The rate was 5.1 in 1965 and 2.8 in 2000. For reference, this indicator evaluates the number of children a woman would have if she lived through her entire potential childbearing period under current conditions.
The decline in fertility is not the same everywhere. It is often presented by country, which has two disadvantages. The first is that this presentation smooths out interstate variability, even though it can be significant. Secondly, it provides no indication of the number of people affected. To address these shortcomings, two researchers at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium proposed an original cartographic method.
They identified 235 zones with comparable population quantities (average of 33.7 million inhabitants), which resembles the traditional breakdown into 239 countries. On the world map, the zones are represented by circles of similar sizes. The sparser the circles, the lower the population densities. Conversely, closely spaced circles highlight areas of high human concentration. The data are from 2021.
The authors identified eight categories by cross-referencing current fertility levels (2021) with their evolution since 2000. These categories are further classified into three groups.
Very Low Fertility
The first group includes zones of very low fertility, which have a TFR of fewer than 1.7 children per woman. These zones account for 41% of the population.
Among these zones, 81 (category, type 1) experienced a decline in fertility. They include developed countries where the model of moderate fertility nuclear families has prevailed for a long time (most of Europe, Japan, and the East and West coasts of the United States), as well as countries where fertility has declined more vigorously where it was initially high (eg, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Iran, Brazil, and Colombia).
Sixteen zones (category, type 2) saw a slight increase in fertility after 2000. However, they had very low fertility — below the generational replacement threshold since the 1960s and ’70s. This is partly due to difficulties for women in balancing professional life and childcare (eg, in Germanic Europe, northern Italy, Spain, central Europe, Ukraine, and Russia).
Low Fertility
The second group includes zones with low (TFR, 1.7-2.1 children per woman) and medium (TFR, 2.1-3.5 children per woman) fertility. Among these zones, the first category (type 3) accounts for 22.6% of the world population. These areas are in developed countries where fertility has been controlled for a long time but remained slightly above 2.1 children per woman (eg, France, inland United States, Australia, and the southern cone of Latin America) and in southern countries where fertility has dropped significantly from higher than three children per woman in 2000.
The second category (types 4-6) accounts for 20.5% of the world population. In type 4, the transition is well underway but slowed down by religious or cultural inertia or the difficulty for educated women to enter the labor market (eg, Morocco, Egypt, South Africa, the Levant, and the Karachi region). Type 5 covers areas that had very high fertility rates in 2000 but are quickly adopting the dominant models of their country or macroregion (eg, the Andes, the Amazon, Cambodia, and Laos), or conversely, are leading the macroregional transition in Africa. In type 6, the decline in fertility was interrupted after 2000 (eg, in North Africa excluding Morocco and in former Soviet Central Asia).
High Fertility
Zones with high fertility (> 3.5 children per woman) now represent only 16.1% of the world population. However, their decline in fertility is significant, exceeding one child per woman. The decline was nearly three children in 20 years in type 7 areas and less (an average of 0.8 children per woman) in type 8. This decline is linked to the increase in the age of marriage, the still insufficient improvement in girls’ education and their access to the labor market, the increased (but often inadequate) use of contraception, and the decrease in infant mortality.
In total, nearly two thirds of the world’s population (63%) have fertility levels below the generational replacement threshold. “Fertility declines in the South are occurring at rates that the North has never experienced during its transition,” wrote the researchers.
