Fertility rising

The number of children women in the developed world are having over their lifetimes is increasing again, or has stopped declining, new research on 37 economies shows. The shift marks an important demographic transition which could have profound economic and social consequences.

Fertility is rising in the English-speaking world, in particular, with Britain, the US, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand all likely to have sufficient births per woman to at least keep populations from falling in years ahead.

The research from the German Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, published in the journal " Population and Development Review " uses new statistical methods to project "cohort fertility" rates (the number of children women from a particular birth year give birth to throughout their lives) which the paper argues have traditionally been significantly underestimated. "These results suggest that the long-term fertility decline in the developed world has come to an end or at least stalled," the study concludes. "[This] confirms that much of the very low fertility is the result of later, not less, childbearing."

Some countries are bucking the trend – Italy, Singapore, Japan and Spain still have very low fertility rates and where these are stabilising, they are still too low to hold populations steady. That requires birth rates of about 2.1 per woman - but the report suggests that current expectations that fertility rates for Japan and Germany of 1.3 and 1.4 respectively are much too pessimistic.

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Against the general trend average cohort fertility is still falling in East Asia, but even there the decline is slowing.

The report notes that the reasons for changes in fertility rates are not clear but probably relate to a combination of changes in gender equality, family and labor policies, and economic and human development. The figures will provide some comfort to countries where the dependency ratio has been rising sharply as the old increasingly outnumber the young economically active, and should ease concerns about who will pay for escalating costs of health and welfare.