In the 1950’s the average woman had five children, since then the number has halved globally – but not in a number of African countries that have the highest fertility rates in the world. Niger republic leads globally with an average of 7.29 children per woman, followed by Somalia (6.37), DR Congo (6.20), Mali (6.14) and Chad (6.05). This is sharp contrast to the world average which was 2.49 while the average for Africa stood at 4.58. Fertility rate and birth rate are both used to determine replacement rate of a country and are both factors in determining the development of countries. Fertility rate on one hand is the average number of children born women of the childbearing age (15-44 years) while birth rate is the number of lives births per 1,000 of the population each year. Most of the countries in the world with the highest fertility rates are in Africa while the North African country of Tunisia has the lowest fertility rate on the continent at 2.147 children per woman – a figure that puts it roughly in the middle of the two hundred countries listed by the United Nations Population Division. Nigeria which has the continent’s largest population has a fertility rate of 5.59. Defining poverty has been tricky among experts since what determines the world’s poorest countries isn’t as clear-cut as dollars and cents. “Data are often hard to come by in some of the most vulnerable countries. What’s more, relying on the gross domestic product (GDP) as a ranking factor doesn’t account for all of a country’s wealth. Even if we find a unifying metric, how do we account for exchange rates?,” Concern Worldwide US stated. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and Central Intelligence Agency all rank countries by their per-capita GDPs (Gross Domestic Products) which is the production of a country versus its income. A more appropriate approach is to focus on the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Reports which rank countries not only by their Gross National Income (GNI), but also by the life expectancy at birth, expected years of schooling, mean years of schooling, and their own human development index (HDI) value. On the list, all of the ranked countries with the highest fertility rates were in the lowest 13 with Niger, which is the most fertile country in the world, also emerging as the world’s poorest country. Poverty and fertility When the global fertility rate was high, it was a period when the very high mortality at a young age kept population growth low. However, as health improves and the mortality in the population decreases, there was accelerated population growth. This rapid population growth then comes to an end as the fertility rate declines and approaches 2 children per woman. The three major reasons for lowering fertility rates are the empowerment of women (increasing access to education and increasing labour market participation), declining child mortality, and a rising cost of bringing up children (to which the decline of child labor contributed). These are issues that these African countries have been unable to deal with in spite of the advances in other parts of the world and within the African continent. But experts argued that this trend will change when more women are empowered, child mortality reduces and it becomes more expensive to raise children in the African countries. As a consequence of the declining global fertility rate the global population growth rate has declined, from a peak of 2.1% per year in 1968 to less than 1.1% today. The world is therefore in the transition to a new balance where rapid population change will come to an end. “The big global demographic transition that the world entered more than two centuries ago is then coming to an end: This new equilibrium is different from the one in the past when it was the very high mortality that kept population growth in check. In the new balance it will be low fertility keeps population changes small,” a group of experts stated. 
The decision to have a child can be a costly decision. So are there any reasons to believe that economic considerations play a role in deciding to have children? The figure below shows the relationship between fertility (more specifically, the total fertility rate) and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (measured in 2010 U.S. dollars) across countries in 2000. The total fertility rate is the expected number of births a woman would have over the course of her life. The decreasing relationship between the two variables demonstrates the connection between fertility choices and economic considerations. In general, poor countries tend to have higher levels of fertility than rich countries. In particular, women tend to give birth to no fewer than three children in countries where GDP per capita is below $1,000 per year. In countries where GDP per capita is above $10,000 per year, women tend to give birth to no more than two children. This decreasing relationship between fertility and income is well known to economists and demographers alike. In addition, it holds true over time: Rich countries, such as the U.S., have experienced a remarkable decline in their fertility rate as they became rich. Also, the relationship holds at the individual level, as rich families tend to have fewer children than poor families. Why is fertility so much higher in poor countries? There are several possible reasons:
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Far from having too many children, many women in developing countries, like their peers in the rich world, are actually having too few: that is, fewer children than they’d like to have. This claim may seem strange: we’re used to hearing about the problem of excessively high fertility in Africa, or the unmet need for contraception. But while unintended or undesired pregnancies are indeed concerningly high in many developing countries, where contraceptive access could be improved, that’s only part of the story. At the same time, total fertility has often plummeted rapidly, even falling below desired fertility. This claim has been nearly impossible to prove in the past for the simple reason that data on desired or ideal fertility has been hard to come by. None of the major international databases on fertility include any systematic, worldwide collection of data on fertility preferences. In layman’s terms, nobody has been systematically recording how many children women around the world actually want to have. This is shocking since women’s childbearing desires and ideals are widely recognized to have a big influence on fertility behaviors (duh!), and because governments and NGOs spend tens of billions of dollars every year on family planning programs domestically and abroad. But alas, around the world, policies intended to enhance reproductive rights and enable family planning are often enacted without any consideration of what women actually say they desire. I have compiled a database from numerous sources on the average number of children a woman of childbearing age in a given country says is ideal to have. The exact question varies somewhat across time and country, but I have tried to focus on personal ideals to the extent possible. I generally prefer questions like, “If you had enough resources for it, how many children would be ideal for you, personally, to have?” Where questions about personal ideals aren’t available, I include general ideals. I do not include questions about intentions to maintain comparability. Overall, I have 727 data points, covering 141 countries, derived from 86 sources, reported in 63 different years, ranging from 1936 to 2018. That may sound like a lot, but the World Bank’s database on fertility has over 11,000 data points. In other words, even with numerous sources, I can only produce a very small database of fertility preferences compared to databases on actual fertility. The map below shows (for each country for which I have any data) the gap between fertility preferences and the total fertility rate for any years with data between 2000 and 2018. In the vast majority of countries, women can expect to have fewer children than those same women say would be ideal. This may be for any number of reasons: financial limitations, lack of a suitable partner, national instability, or infertility. And, of course, in some countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, fertility rates do currently exceed women’s ideals, suggesting that improving contraceptive access remains vital to public health there. But that situation is unusual. Most women around the world, even most women in countries outside of Europe and North America, are more likely to undershoot than overshoot their fertility ideals. If this argument sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve made it before, in detail, for the United States. We have good data on this topic in America, and so can prove the argument very clearly. But the American situation, it turns out, is not unique! Around the world, it could be said that there is a lot more of a demand for children than there is a supply. One reason this fact is not widely understood is that—until now—there has been no global database of fertility preferences including both developed and developing countries. To the best of my knowledge, I am the first person to have done the legwork to combine existing, fragmentary databases, national statistical sources, international social surveys, and academic research. In most academic work, the experiences of rich and poor countries have been segregated, treating them like totally separate worlds. Poor countries, so the story goes, have problems with excess births, which requires help from international donors to provide contraceptives. Rich, democratic countries, meanwhile, aren’t usually thought to have a systematic reproductive rights problem at all. But in reality, fertility has fallen so rapidly in the developing world that many poorer countries now face the same problems as Europe and America: women want to have children, but can’t make it work given the economic, social, and relational conditions facing them. Meanwhile, that problem, of missing kids, rather than just unintended births, is gaining more public attention. Because much of the “population establishment” (as represented by the government and nongovernment organizations that organize conferences, coordinate donor money, and advise policymakers) operates from the mistaken assumption that most women have more kids than they want, they tend to give one-sided advice. When international NGOs talk about supporting women’s empowerment, or committing resources to family planning, or enhancing women’s sense of agency over their reproduction, they inevitably mean just one thing: helping women avoid unintended pregnancies. And, to be clear, that is valuable work. But it isn’t enough. Population, reproduction, and family-oriented NGOs basically ignore the question of how to achieve desired births, not just avoid undesired births. Relatedly, major development benchmarks like the Human Development Index, or the Millennium Development Goals, do not even bother to include any metric of fertility desires in their standards. This creates a vicious cycle. Governments and donors don’t collect data on fertility desires. Because the issue goes unmeasured, NGOs and civil society actors have little incentive to work for improvements in desire fulfillment. Because the people doing the yeoman’s work on family policy spend their day thinking about, for example, providing cheap contraceptives, rather than providing cheap diapers, they never push their governments to think more holistically about fertility. So, the cycle repeats. And the end result is that fertility settles well below the levels that women around the world say they want. But it’s time for policymakers and researchers to wake up and address the problem. Missing-but-wanted children now substantially outnumber unwanted births. Missing kids are a global phenomenon, not just a rich-world problem. Multiplying out each country’s fertility gap by its population of reproductive age women reveals that, for women entering their reproductive years in 2010 in the countries in my sample, there are likely to be a net 270 million missing births—if fertility ideals and birth rates hold stable. Put another way, over the 30 to 40 years these women would potentially be having children, that’s about 6 to 10 million missing babies per year thanks to the global undershooting of fertility. A very large amount of excess births come from India. A close look at India reveals, however, that fertility rates are falling a lot faster than desired fertility. In fact, around the world, countries with above-ideals fertility are getting rarer, so, if anything, this estimate of missing kids is an underestimate. The likely future for currently above-ideals fertility countries can be seen by looking at other comparable countries. Senegal once had birth rates well above what women said they desired. But today, that is no longer true. Rapid declines in birth rates have sent fertility well below levels Senegalese women say is ideal, despite Senegal still being an extremely poor country. Bangladesh, likewise, has seen a switch from above-ideals fertility to (now) near-ideals fertility. It remains to be seen whether Bangladesh’s decline will continue or not, but India’s has appeared to accelerate in recent years. It is reasonable for India to want to avoid above-ideals fertility rates: those are births women say they’d rather not have! But it seems unlikely that the decline will stop when the gap hits zero. More likely, it keeps falling, and Indian women within the next generation, or at most two, will experience below-ideals fertility. This issue isn’t unique to India. In fact, it’s global. Using the population-weighted average of TFR and fertility ideals for countries where data is available (which covers well over 90% of global population), we can see how global fertility ideals have changed over time. While fertility ideals around the world do seem to be inching downwards, fertility is falling much faster. Today, fertility has slipped considerably below what the average reproductive-age woman says is her personal fertility ideal, and that gap continues to widen. The problem of missing children is a serious problem. But it is understandable that many experts, governments, and non-governmental organizations are unfamiliar with this problem since the relevant data collection has been scattered and infrequent. Furthermore, because most of the twentieth century was characterized by above-ideals fertility, the idea that global fertility might durably drop below what women desire seemed farfetched. But that is where we are today. And since we now live in a world with a growing global shortfall in births, it is incumbent on the policymaking community to take the problem seriously, and look for solutions. Lyman Stone is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and an Adjunct Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Note: The World Fertility Ideals dataset is available for distribution upon request, and identifies data sources. |
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