The Worldwide Fertility Crash Is Bringing Countries Back to Pre-Industrial Birth Levels

A quiet but continuing worldwide collapse in fertility levels has swept the globe. Most regions of the world are now characterized by sub-replacement fertility 1 , and every region of the world has at least some sub-replacement outposts. But while jaw-dropping declines in fertility levels per se have captured attention (it’s hard not to be shocked, say, by Mexico City’s less than one birth per woman), the actual birth totals associated with these record-breaking fertility declines deserve attention, too. Steep and prolonged fertility decline means that peak birth levels for most of the world’s countries took place in the past—often well in the past. And for a growing number of countries, birth totals today now approximate levels witnessed literally centuries ago—in some cases, even before the Industrial Era. Consider first the agglomeration of countries and places today characterized by sub-replacement fertility. The UN Population Division’s World Population Prospects 2024 is probably the best handy compendium of such estimates. By its reckoning, as of 2023 slightly over 70 percent of humanity lived in sub-replacement nations or territories. We can show estimated postwar birth trends for this agglomeration (comprised of 83 locales of a million or more, plus an additional 47 with populations of less than a million). In 2023, the estimated births for these 130 sub-replacement populations totaled roughly 65 million. But as we can see in Figure 1, today’s global sub-replacement populations—encompassing nearly 5.8 billion people—had far fewer babies in 2023 than they did decades earlier. The estimated birth peak for this grouping, in fact, came in 1990.  Back then, the grouping’s total population was far smaller (about 4.3 billion). Nevertheless, birth totals for the current world’s sub-replacement areas were about 35 percent lower in 2023 than 33 years earlier. Note as well: estimated births for current sub-replacement areas are actually lower now (2023) than in 1950, the year global UNPD estimates begin. Back in 1950, today’s sub-replacement areas were generating an estimated 74 million births a year—9 million more than in 2023, 73 years later. How long ago did today’s sub-replacement populations first produce 65 million births in a single calendar year? Quick and dirty calculations suggest the date was likely before World War II: circa 1938. 2 In other words, the overwhelming majority of humanity nowadays is celebrating birth totals first experienced 85 years earlier—over three generations before—even though that agglomeration’s ranks were vastly smaller back then. While we lack accurate global birth data for 1938, we do have such figures for numerous countries. In some cases, these series extend back hundreds of years. The admirable Human Mortality Database , pioneered by researchers at Berkeley and Rostock, Germany, offers careful reconstructions of such historical birth numbers for dozens of developed countries. We can use their figures for our comparisons. Start with Japan. By 2024, the Japanese birth level was barely a quarter of its peak in 1947, 77 years earlier (686,000 vs. over 2.7 million). But Japan’s 2024 level was also significantly lower than the corresponding total for 1873—over 150 years earlier, at the dawn of the Meiji era, when Japan first started gathering such numbers. Same story for France. Metropolitan France (the “European” part, without overseas départements ) reported 639,000 births in 2023—barely two thirds as many as in 1806: the year Napoleon won the Battle of Jena, over two hundred years earlier. And then there is Italy. At roughly 380,000, Italy’s birth level in 2023 was not only less than a third of the 1922 level, under Mussolini, a century earlier. It was also less than half the total for 1862, over 160 years beforehand, at the time of the Risorgimento , the unification of the modern Italian state. So: how far back do you have to go to get ‘modern’ birth totals for countries at the vanguard of the ongoing birth crash? Table 1 offers rough calculations for a few of them. China’s 2025 birth totals look like early Qing Dynasty levels; Japan’s take us back to the first half of the Tokugawa shogunate. In France, birth levels like today’s would have been witnessed under Henri IV: roughly around the time of the Jamestown Colony in America. As for Italy: today’s birth levels may take us back to Leonardo and the Medicis. And remember—fertility levels around the world are still falling. [1] I.e., childbearing patterns insufficient on their own to maintain long-term population stability: generally a bit over two births per woman per life time; most people use a benchmark total fertility rate or TFR of 2.1 to approximate this. [2] At the risk of TMI: rough approximations based on back-projections from UNPD data, cross-checked by estimates from ‘model life’ tables for stable populations with mortality and fertility levels approximating notional global levels in 1900 and 1950. The post The Worldwide Fertility Crash Is Bringing Countries Back to Pre-Industrial Birth Levels appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .