The work published Wednesday March 20 in the journal The Lancet anticipate a faster decline in human fertility than expected at the global level. Coming from the international collaborative project Global Burden of Disease (GBD) and led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), this work concludes that around 2050, the average fertility index could be around 1.8 children per woman on a global scale. Or below the population renewal threshold.
An index which could drop to 1.6 children per woman at the end of the century, according to this work. By comparison, the latest United Nations projections, released in 2022, projected an average number of children per woman of around 2.1 in 2050 and 1.8 in 2100.
The GBD was based on the analysis of the evolution of global demographics between 1950 and 2021, and modeled the evolution of the fertility rate, country by country, until the end of the century. Over the past seventy years, the fertility rate has more than halved, from 4.8 children per woman in 1950 to 2.2 in 2021.
Birth schism
Above all, the researchers conducted their analysis country by country: they anticipate a more or less general fall. Not only in the countries of the North, generally already below the replacement threshold – Western Europe is, in 2021, at around 1.5 children per woman (1.75 in France) –, but also in the countries in the South, as populations there become urbanized, as women gain access to education and means of contraception, as infant mortality falls, etc. In 2021, around 46% of the 204 countries or regions considered were below the renewal threshold; this proportion could rise to 76% in 2050 and 97% in 2100.
The authors anticipate a birth rate schism, with sub-Saharan Africa remaining the only large dynamic region in the world for much of the current century. “As human civilization converges toward the reality of low fertility, write the researchers, relatively high rates in some low-income countries and territories will result in a clear demographic divide between a subset of low-income countries and the rest of the world. »
Researchers expect that by 2100 only Samoa, Somalia, the Tonga Islands, Niger, Chad and Tajikistan will remain above the population renewal threshold. At the other end of the spectrum, Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh and even Saudi Arabia could see their fertility index fall below one child per woman.
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