Low national fertility rates become more widespread
July 23, 2013
The majority of the world’s people now live in nations where the fertility rate is below replacement level.
“Thirty years ago only a small fraction of the world’s population lived in the few countries with fertility rates substantially below the ‘replacement level,’” note Michael Teitelbaum, a fellow at Harvard Law School, and Jay Winter, a history professor at Yale University. “Fast forward to 2013, with roughly 60 percent of the world’s population living in countries with such below-replacement fertility rates.”
Writing in YaleGlobal Online Magazine, Teitelbaum and Winter explore the geopolitical and social implications of widespread low fertility rates, including “the future of pension provisions and care for the elderly, the evolution of immigration policies, the ethnic and language distributions within societies, [and] the potential for violence within and among different religious and ethnic communities.”
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