The Economist (June 4)
“You are having too many babies. For decades that crude message was drilled into the minds of Indians by their rulers.” Slogans on schools proclaimed, “Two or three children, enough.” There were even forced sterilizations in the 1970s. “But when Indian school textbooks are reprinted this summer, they will carry a very different message. They will warn not of the dangers of having too many babies, but of the risks of having too few.” The “surprise baby bust” taking place in India “is a warning to the world. It is not just rich places that are becoming less fertile.”
Tags: 1970s, Babies, Baby bust, Children, Fertile, Forced sterilizations, India, Rich places, Schools, Slogans, Surprise, Textbooks, Warning
Financial Times (February 27)
Although “some demographic experts had been hopeful of a pent-up baby boom in Japan following the pandemic,” 2024 confirmed the worst. “The number of babies born in Japan last year fell to the lowest level since records began 125 years ago as the country’s demographic crisis deepens and government efforts to reverse the decline continue to fail.” For nine years straight, “the decline in births has continued unabated…. Combined with a record 1.6mn deaths last year, the figures mean Japan’s population shrank by almost 900,000 people, net of immigration.”
Tags: 2024, Babies, Baby boom, Births, Deaths, Decline, Demographic crisis, Experts, Fail, Government, Immigration, Japan, Pandemic, Pent-up, Population, Record
Wall Street Journal (May 17)
“American women are having children at the lowest rate on record, with the number of babies born in the U.S. last year dropping to a 30-year low…. The figures suggest that a number of women who put off having babies after the 2007-09 recession are forgoing them altogether.” This could spell trouble as America’s aging population is already “creating a funding imbalance that strains the social safety net that supports the elderly.”
Tags: Aging, Babies, Children, Elderly, Funding, Population, Recession, Safety net, U.S., Women
The Economist (June 11)
Like Japan, South Korea is also facing a major demographics challenge, especially if they can’t succeed in upping the percentage of working women. “With a fertility rate of around 1.2 babies per woman, South Korea’s labour force is set to shrink dramatically. If the country fails to make use of half its talent pool, stagnation looms. An OECD study estimated that if the labour-force participation rate for men and women was the same by 2030, GDP growth would increase by 0.9 percentage points annually. Since 2010 growth has fallen from 6.5% to 2.6%.”
Tags: Babies, Demographics, Fertility, GDP, Growth, Japan, South Korea, Stagnation, Working women
