The Future of Low Birth-Rate Populations

Lincoln H. Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134799084
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Lincoln Day assesses the demographic situation, the likely policy alternatives, the significance of future changes in fertility and mortality rates and analyses the likely losses and gains attendant upon an ageing, dwindling people.

1
THE DEMOGRAPHIC SITUATION

THE EUROPEAN SHARE OF THE TOTAL

Because no population in history has yet experienced such an alteration of its demographic structure, discussion of the consequences of the demographic course of events posited in the current projections for low-birthrate populations is necessarily speculative. There is, however, one fear that the prospect of this change has given rise to about which there can be no question: the European share of total world numbers will inevitably decline. The process is already under way—less a result of low European fertility, however, than of the continuation, elsewhere, of much higher fertility and the higher growth rates that emanate from it. Low European fertility only hastens this process; it does not account for it.

Europeans were some 18 per cent of the world total in 1750. By the middle of the 20th century, following upon two centuries of unprecedented growth, they had increased their share to some 29 per cent (estimated from data in Durand 1967, Table 1, assuming half of the Russian population to have been European in both periods, and Europeans, in the later period, to have constituted 90 per cent of the combined populations of the United States and Canada, 50 per cent of the populations of Middle and South America, and 77 per cent of the population of Oceania). During that period, world population more than trebled and Europeans emigrated in sizeable numbers to every continent. Between 1950 and 1985, European numbers (on the same assumptions as to their proportions within regions) increased another 50 per cent (from some 722 to some 1091 million), but their share of the world total dropped to 23 per cent (U.N. 1986, Table 4). If the fertility assumptions of the United Nations’ ‘medium variant’ projection are realized, European numbers (using the same assumptions as to proportionate shares by continent) will have increased another 32 per cent by 2025, but their proportion of the world total will have declined further still—to 18 per cent (ibid., Table 4); to, that is, about what it was on the eve of the modern period of rapid population increase.

It is doubtful whether such a change in relative proportions could, itself, have much effect on European lifestyles and living conditions. Nor would it be likely to cause or quicken the pace of a decline in European influence or the demise of European civilization. Whatever their share of the world’s total, a billion or so Europeans cannot help but figure prominently on the world stage—not to mention the fact that it took far fewer than that number (and at a much lower level of technology and standard of living) to create and develop European civilization in the first place. The more probable demographic threat to European lifestyles and civilization may well be not too few Europeans, but too many.

RECENT TRENDS IN THE FERTILITY OF LOW-FERTILITY POPULATIONS

In the countries under consideration here, the lowest fertility levels preceding those of the present period were reached in the Great Depression of the 1930s. On the basis of the ‘net reproduction rate’ (a measure of the extent to which, under a given set of age-specific birth rates, the average woman would reproduce herself during her period of childbearing), the mid–1930s population of Germany was failing to reproduce itself by 30 per cent a generation, that of Britain by 23 per cent, of France by 13 per cent (calculated from date in U.N. 1954, Table 21), and of Austria, which had the lowest fertility of all, by a whopping 33 per cent (calculated from data in Carr-Saunders 1936, insert between pp. 122 and 123) (Chart 1.1).

But because of their relatively youthful age structures and their subsequent increases in fertility, in none of these countries, except France, did a decline in total numbers actually occur—and France’s modest decline (280,000—less than seven-tenths of a per cent of the population (U.N. 1951, Table 3)) occurred only because that country’s exceptionally long (at least 150–year) history of the individual practice of birth control had produced an age distribution that, from the standpoint of demographic stability, was relatively undistorted.

Chart 1.1 Changes in net reproduction rates, 1935–85: selected low-fertility countries

Fertility rose markedly in these countries in the period following World War II, and then again commenced to decline, about the beginning of the 1960s. In the years since, it has never returned to either the unusually high levels of the post-World War II period or the more usual, but nonetheless higher, levels of the pre-Depression period. Moreoever, this time around, the pattern of low and declining fertility cuts a wider swathe, for it includes those European countries, mostly in the East and South, that did not experience the declines of the earlier period.

The differences between the fertility patterns of today and those of the 1930s in these countries are substantial and significant. Today’s levels are lower, they have remained at these low levels longer, and, perhaps most important, they appear to represent a fundamental change in the numbers of children potential parents desire (or, at least, are willing to accept in preference either to obtaining an abo...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• THE FUTURE OF LOW-BIRTHRATE POPULATIONS
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• 1: THE DEMOGRAPHIC SITUATION
• 2: THE FUTURE OF FERTILITY AND MORTALITY
• 3: THE CHALLENGE OF NUMERICAL DECLINE AND OLDER AGE STRUCTURE: PART 1 FINANCES AND THE PROVISION OF CARE
• 4: THE CHALLENGE OF NUMERICAL DECLINE AND OLDER AGE STRUCTURE: PART 2 HOUSEHOLDS, LABOR FORCE, ECONOMIC CONDITIONS AND BEHAVIOR
• 5: POLICY ALTERNATIVES: DEMOGRAPHIC
• 6: SOME COMPENSATIONS IN THE TREND TOWARD OLDER AGE STRUCTURES AND NUMERICAL DECLINES
• 7: POLICY ALTERNATIVES: NONDEMOGRAPHIC
• 8: CONCLUSION