0.2 Historic perspectives: economic and population growth  (Page 8/10)

And even in tropical Africa, very high fertility rates have been declining in recent years. In 1980, in sub-Saharan Africa, there were seven births per woman. By 1990 fertility rates were 6.2. By 2007, there were only 5.3 births per woman in over thirty nations in sub-Saharan Africa, only six had fertility rates of 7.6 by 2005.

Very low income nations in Africa-including Chad, Mali, Sierra Leone and Nigeria-still have very high fertility rates. The Niger example is instructive. According to the World Bank, Niger (with per capita income of less than U.S.$300) is one of the poorest, if not the poorest nation in the world. World Bank, World Development Indicators 2011 , Washington, DC: World Bank; World Bank, World Development Report 2013 , Washington, DC: World Bank. Niger’s population grew from 9.2 million in 1995 to 17.0 million in 2013, an annual rate of increase of 4.2%. Death rates are high because of a chronic shortage of food. But fertility in Nigeria in 2013 stood at 7.6 children per human, the highest on earth.

In Niger, poverty interacts with very poor access to contraception and culture to yield the very high rate of fertility. Only 12% of women of child bearing age in Niger use contraceptives, versus about 50% of women in the African nations of Rwanda and Zimbabwe. In addition, men in Niger tend to have multiple wives. According to the London Economist , local physicians maintain that wives in polygamous marriage there often seek to prove their worth by outdoing each other in child birth. The Economist (2014, August 16), “Population Explosion: Runaway birth rates are a disaster”.

Thus, although there are important exceptions, the worldwide decline in fertility has been nothing short of remarkable. In nearly 200 nations for which the World Bank has data, fertility declined in all but six . Of the six, four nations had constant fertility rates. Only two nations had increased fertility. These were France and the Netherlands. There was a slight increase in both these nations because their fertility rates before were already very low in 1990 (1.8%) and because they enacted incentives for higher fertility in the 1990s.

The world average for fertility rates had fallen to 3.2 by 1990 and to 2.5 by 2007. For low and mid-income nations, the rates fell just as sharply between 1990 and 2007, from 3.5 to 2.7. The average for high income nations was 1.8, well below the replacement rate.

We note that fertility rates in emerging nations are generally below 3 and still falling . But in the 1970s , fertility rates were much higher, and so were population growth rates. From 1965-1973 population growth rates in emerging nations averaged 2.5% per year.

Dire predictions by experts were then plentiful: world population was going to explode. But new evidence on fertility behavior over time shows how careful we need to be in making population forecasts.

Recent experience with falling fertility in richer countries has led to the view that they are beginning a state of reproductive collapse , and that this will also happen to many emerging nations. South Korea and Japan are often cited as existing examples of reproductive collapse, while China, as a result of the “one-child per family" policy, possibly, is cited as a future example.