Births began to decline sharply in late 2020 after the Covid-19 epidemic and people were confined to their homes in a lockdown, exacerbating an already dangerous demographic decline in rich countries. The trend reflects the declines during the 1918 flu pandemic, the Great Depression and the global financial crisis in 2008. But an analysis of national data shows a rapid recovery in most developed countries. “The short-term decline in births seen in many countries is consistent with other historical crises. . . “But in the case of Covid-19, these reductions were more short-lived,” the UN said. This is largely due to government spending and efforts to develop and distribute Covid vaccines. The financial uncertainty caused by the pandemic “was addressed by stimulus packages and the expansionary reactions of central banks,” said Klaus Pretner, a professor of economics at the Vienna University of Economics.
The phenomenon of the pandemic
When many countries first imposed a lockdown to tackle the pandemic in early 2020, sexual activity declined, according to research by French pollster Ifop. Between the end of 2020 and the first half of 2021, nine months after the first lockdown, countries ranging from China to France reported the lowest number of births recorded. Italy had fewer births in 2021 than at any other time since the country was created in 1861.
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Fertility rates refer to the average number of babies a woman is expected to have in her lifetime. It is generally accepted by demographers that a country’s population can only increase without pure internal migration if couples have at least 2.1 children on average. Many developed economies already have fertility rates well below that. Kate H Choi, director of the Center for Research on Social Inequality, said people tend to have fewer children when faced with “a long-term, catastrophic event that leads to high levels of uncertainty.” Covid-era couples “may not want to bring a child into this world if they do not know where their next paycheck comes from,” he said. However, births began to recover later in 2021 in countries such as the United States, the Nordic countries, Australia and Israel – returning and in some cases overcoming the pre-pandemic trend, which demographers said was a cover-up effect. In England and Wales, births fell by 5 percent in the first half of 2021 compared to the same period in 2019. By the second half of the year, the number of births had returned to 2019. By the end of 2021 , countries had recorded the first annual increase in births since 2015. After experiencing a sharp decline in births, Spain had more births in March and April 2021 than in the same period in 2020. In Germany, March 2021 had more births than any other March in the last 20 years. In the US, the Census Bureau observed that the number of babies born between December 2020 and February 2021 was unusually low, equivalent to 763 fewer births each day in December. “This is very likely the outcome of the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Anne Morse, a Census Bureau demographer. By the second half of 2021, the US recorded the same number of births as the same period in 2019. Population experts and economists believe the monetary and fiscal stimulus launched by many governments in the first months of the pandemic was a critical factor in helping to prevent long-term birth rates. Karoline Schmid, who heads the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ Department of Fertility and Aging, said stimulus initiatives had played a role in preventing a sharp drop in fertility rates by providing a financial reserve against financial uncertainty. “Fertility is declining during and immediately after the financial crises caused by couples postponing childbearing due to rising unemployment, rising job insecurity and declining household incomes,” he said. “Monetary incentives from governments in some countries have helped prevent a sharp drop in fertility at the onset of the pandemic.”
The baby’s bust
This still leaves the world facing the same demographic time bomb as before the pandemic: reducing fertility rates that threaten to slow global growth and leave countries to bear the cost of an aging population.
Baby bust: the demographic crisis
Global birth rates are falling and the world’s population will start to shrink in the coming decades. A new FT series looks at why – and whether policymakers can do anything about it. Day 1: How the pandemic affected the baby’s bust Day 2: China is at the center of the global population crisis Day 3: Can policy makers do anything about it? Day 4: We learn to live with the financial consequences The global fertility rate peaked at five in 1960 and has been in free fall ever since. As a result, demographers believe that, after centuries of rapid population growth, the world is on the brink of a natural population decline. According to a Lancet newspaper published in 2020, the world population will peak at around 9.7 billion by 2064, dropping to about 8.7 billion by the end of the century. About 23 nations can expect their population to halve by 2100: Japan’s population will shrink from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53 million. Italy is from 61 to 28 million. Low fertility rates triggered a chain of economic events. Fewer young people are leading a smaller workforce, affecting tax revenues, pensions and health care contributions. “An economy with a labor shortage problem can face higher labor costs, reduced productivity and lower living standards,” Choi said.
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Christopher Murray, one of the authors of the Lancet report, said it was difficult to overestimate the economic and social impact of reduced fertility. “We need to reorganize society,” he said. But the future does not have to be revealing. In addition to the widely reported environmental benefits, reduced fertility could lead governments to invest more in education, according to Prettner. “When fertility rates fall, governments have more resources to spend on schooling,” he said. “Many of the potential negative economic consequences of reduced fertility can be offset by the relative higher productivity these children later have in the labor market.” Additional report by Valentina Romei in London
