Future. What will it bring to us? Different people will have different opinions about that question, but one thing will remain consistent, new times will carry new problems, and one of those possible problems is decreasing birth rates or total fertility rates (TFR). But why is that? You might look at particular websites and say that the population is constantly growing and the approximate world population for the year 2050 will be around 9.8 billion, so how can it be a problem? Well, to explain this paradox, I’ll appeal to some statistics and other information I was able to find, to provide some basis for my article. 

For a population to grow, its TFR should be at least 2.1 persons per woman, but for most countries, we can see the exact opposite situation. For example, TFR has dropped by more than 23% from 2007 to 2022, and by this day most of the developed countries TFR is below 2. The average US TFR is 1.74 person per woman, 1.68 in Europe, 1.15 in China, 1.36 in Japan and this number is similar to most of the developed countries. The reason behind this is the development of those countries itself. People are more educated than ever, and have access to technologies and medicine (including contraceptives) that make their lives much easier and because of this, they have more free time than 100 years ago. Free time allows people to think more. This process of thinking eventually will bring new ideas which will cause the development of the culture and creation of new trends and with the existence of the internet, these ideas are spread faster than ever. One example of this can be a culture war between men and women, that happened all around the world, which heats relationships and spreads hostility between them. Of course, other factors besides culture can cause this phenomenon, like war, crisis, or epidemic, but they have less influence because most of them happened at a local point and usually took a short period.

Although the situation doesn’t seem promising for developed countries, what about countries that are less developed? For those countries birth rates are much higher, for most African countries, and some Middle Eastern countries, TFRs are very high, for example, Niger has the highest TFR in the world which is almost 7 persons per woman, and the overall average birth rate in Africa countries is about 4.1 children per woman. This can be explained by the lack of contraceptive medicine, lack of education, and tough living conditions that require more people to live together in order to survive.

Decreased birth rates mean that the number of people who die will be higher than the number of people who will be born, therefore population will most likely decrease, and for some countries, this could happen pretty soon. Particularly for Japan, whose birth rate is about 1.36, and 600 million people are older than 50 years old with a total population of 122 million. Based on this information a conclusion can be made that over the next 30 years, a country will lose a significant amount of its population and at least half of its people will be 50+ years old, which means that the country will most likely have a weak economy, due to the lack of employees and consumers. Similar consequences will occur in other developed countries if nothing changes. While in other countries population will grow, according to IMF African country’s population will most likely double and constitute 2.3 billion people by 2050, which will cause mass migration to the countries that will suffer from lack of people/employees.

How can we stop this? Well, there is not much a single person can do, because it is a large-scale complex problem from both political and cultural perspectives, which requires governments to take extreme action. Those actions most likely will not be tolerated by the majority of people, therefore, it is very hard to fix that.  Overall this article is about a possible problem humanity might face in the future, and we can not know for sure what will be tomorrow, so the only thing we have left is to work on the problems we have today.