Opinion | Why China’s declining population growth may be good news
- Evidence suggests that in all prosperous countries where women are well educated and free to choose whether to have children, fertility rates fall significantly. This should be seen as a positive development
- When populations no longer grow, there are fewer workers per retiree, but also a reduced need for infrastructure and housing investment
But a comment posted on the microblogging platform Weibo was more insightful: “The declining fertility rate actually reflects the progress in the thinking of Chinese people – women are no longer a fertility tool.”
Only in poorer countries, concentrated in Africa and the Middle East, are much higher birth rates still observed. In India, all the more prosperous states – such as Maharashtra and Karnataka – have fertility rates below the replacement level, with only the poorer states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh still well above.
And while the national rate in 2018 was still 2.2, the Indian National Family Health Survey finds that Indian women would like to have, on average, 1.8 children.
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Half a century of evidence suggests that in all prosperous countries where women are well educated and free to choose whether and when to have children, fertility rates fall significantly below replacement levels. If those conditions spread across the world, the global population will eventually decline.
