Today to address a rather speculative problem, rather a problem in a rather speculative way concerning the demographic future,
in particular the fertility future of the developing world, as the developing world becomes more developed as time goes on,
birth rates in most but not all parts of what we call the developing world keep on going down.
There is no lower limit yet in sight. Already, a high proportion of the population of the so-called developing world lives in countries
where the overall total fertility is approaching or even lower than replacement rate.
The prospect is is emerging of large parts of the what we now call the developing world,
acquiring birth rates maybe even lower than those characteristic of north Western Europe and the United States,
while at the same time a minor part of the developing world continues to grow rapidly under high alert.
The study of diminishing fertility, particularly, of course,
in sub-Saharan Africa and a few Asian countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and so on.
And this is just an attempt to see what's going on, what may happen next and what the consequences might be.
I'll try and use this clicker.
Once upon a time, it was widely believed with some justice that I made a lot of sense for people in poor countries to have quite high fertility,
and that, of course, was almost universally true for the demographic transition began in the 18th and 19th century.
The reasons, I think well known and fairly obvious, I listed a few of them here.
The notion much popularised by Jack Caldwell, for example,
that that children were actively beneficial to their parents in many circumstances, that their activities, even when they were young,
brought in either cash or more usually services in the form of looking after animals,
looking after agriculture of various kinds, performing tasks of an artisan nature and so on.
Undoubtedly, children do help to a varying degree, depending on the economy in various traditional kinds of society.
However, I think that the truth of the matter is summarised by Tim Dyson's famous comment
in 1991 that people don't have children in order that children may work,
but rather the children work because people have children. In other words, people have children.
Much more fundamental reasons than possibly, even in my view, biological ones,
rather than the desire to turn them into a private workforce or private army.
The government are going to be there. Then, of course, they're put to use and it's natural and desirable that they should do so.
And that is the normal order of things.
Social prestige also important, although here it's very important to realise that particularly in Africa, where marital ties tend to be rather weak,
the social prestige and the glory, if any, arising from having a large number of children accrues,
the man, the chores and the burden accrue to the woman.
It's true that in tropical Africa or in many other parts of the world,
a woman without any children at all is a kind of social outcast and is in a terrible psychological and social condition.
Nonetheless, the benefit of children to the point of view of social standing is very unequal in many societies.
And it's only because the overriding power of men over women that birthrates in many places remain as high as they do.
The other points, I think are well known the risk insurance and the importance of civil society is weak.
The trouble is, a lot of these reasons so well justified when they were put forward in the past now seem to be rather rather rather threadbare.
For example, Cane showed rather persuasively back in Bangladesh in 1980 that the absence of civil society,
the weakness of local government, the fact the only people who could depend upon where your kid,
especially in a country prone to natural disasters like Bangladesh,
that it was really very desirable to keep on preserving the kid network by having lots of children.
Bangladesh, as we all know, has had quite a rapid fertility transition from TFR, about seven in 1970,
down to about three at the present time, rather undermining that apparently perfectly logical argument put forward by me.
Kate, the same sort of argument of Cauldwell put forward in the 1970s about the utility of
children is much undermined by the by the not only by the reduction in the birthrate,
but also by what people actually say in response to questionnaires.
A number of enquiries by Vlasov Castellan and many others actually asking people why they have children and whether
these reasons for high fertility have actually impinged upon their consciousness and influenced their decision making,
appear not to be terribly valid. In many cases, they say these things don't matter that much or do matter that much anymore.
Interestingly enough. There are, of course, also problems of population growth at the state level, I won't dwell on this.
I think Filipinos probably discussed these things probably from our different point of view to mine extensively.
So I won't repeat it. But the sorts of arguments for for for growth and large size are well known.
The problems arising from rapid growth are also well known.
And to cut a long story short, appear to have been taken on board and accepted not only by families at the family level,
most of whom are now limiting their fertility, sometimes to very low levels, but also at the macro level, at the state level by governments.
Most of the governments of countries in the developing world have got family policies which attempt to moderate birth rates,
moderate population growth and bring things into stabilisation. Some of them, as you know, are policies of astonishing power and authoritarian nature,
notably in China, trying to undercut a population momentum with its one child policy.
So now we're in a position where we're not only our most individual families limiting their family size with modern methods of family planning,
but also most governments in which those people live are trying to promote various forms of family limitation and bring birth rates down.
So it's by no means a complete consensus, but that is the way that things are going.
A number of things have hold up, this process of decline is by no means universal in the developing world.
As we know, the instability of many governments may make it either impossible to manage family planning programmes,
impossible to obtain family planning services, or even imprudent to start limiting your numbers,
particularly if you live in a diversified population where there are many different tribal groupings,
where it may seem entirely foolish to start limiting your your birth rate and your numbers when others may not be doing the same thing,
particularly, of course,
when some form of democracy starts to become practised in a country and then numbers start to matter much more perhaps than they used to,
particularly when unfortunately, in so many developing countries, political parties develop upon an ethnic or tribal or racial or cultural grounds,
and not on the Class-Based system, which were more used to perhaps in in Western Europe.
So these these are factors which are quite important.
There are also what you might call geological and political factors affecting fertility decline operating in the developed world as well.
One one very strong point of contention is the effect of the international.
Council on Population Development in 1994 in Cairo,
some regard this as a major breakthrough in the empowerment of women and and in the broadening of family planning incentives and an obsession,
if you like, into a much wider health related kind of perspective.
John, Hopcroft, for example, a noted British demographer, is very keen on that idea.
Others, like Wolfgang Lutz, regard the CMPD as the final process whereby demographic science was shoved into the back seat in
international population discussions and decision making and replaced by political activism of various kinds.
One of the consequences, certainly of Cairo has been a very substantial reduction in the amount of money spent on family planning services.
And given that there are many parts of the world where where family planning
services are inadequate to meet the stated needs of the people living there.
This is undoubtedly a retarded fertility decline in many parts of the world.
There's also been doubtless a sort of a similar political ideological reasons,
a remarkable absence of population awareness in a large number of international agreements where
population might have been thought to have been one of several salient important factors.
This was discussed, I think you may recall, in quite strong terms in the Human Sciences Symposium a couple of weeks ago.
In all these agreements on the Millennium Development Goals, on making poverty history,
the Kyoto agreement, demography was not mentioned at all, or in one or two shoved into an afterthought.
This seems to me to be a major weakness of those agreements and a major error of judgement.
Nonetheless, despite all that, it is the case that birthrates in all but about a dozen countries are going down.
As I mentioned, half the world's population now lives in countries where the TFR is at replacement level or lower.
But we have a diverse future facing this because most countries are in that position.
Others have either not started their transition at all, like a Niger and Mali and a few other handful of countries in others.
The fertility transition has stalled for some reason at a level that's still quite substantially above replacement level at three or so,
which is which is in conditions of quite low mortality,
quite enough to drive population growth to a very, very high levels in different parts of the world.
One point which you might really keep in mind.
As we as we go through these points is, of course, of what we call the developing world is getting smaller,
not for demographic reasons, but for economic reasons.
More and more countries, as their economy improves, as they move out of the agricultural sector into industrial and service industries,
will no longer be properly regarded as developing. But they will become developed.
And that is part and parcel, of course, of the whole process of fertility,
declining, mortality declining, and the modernisation of of social life in general.
This is just remind us of the variety and total fertility which we see in countries still classed as part of the developing world at the present time,
you will see that there is over a fourfold difference in TFR between these different countries.
At the top, we've got Mali, Niger over seven or about seven, Uganda, almost seven, Congo and Oman.
In the top block, there's a trio of of countries, Kenya, Pakistan and the Philippines.
It's been between five and three and then below three, India, Egypt, Botswana, Ecuador, Indonesia, South Africa and Sri Lanka.
This is just a selection. There's not the whole lot, of course. And then clearly very replacement.
Already we've got Chile, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Brazil, China, Iran, Thailand and a number of others.
And the difference in the top and the bottom of that is four times, which is really quite astonishing for countries,
all of which are still classified as developing, although, of course,
their GDP are somewhat different because some of the ones at the bottom are still relatively poor,
is by no means a very clear correlation between wealth on the one hand and low birthrates on the other, or high birthrates for that matter.
So pressing the button to enthusiastically get back. Want to go back?
Revert to manual. Oh, oh. And.
Thank you. Always rather young for advice.
Oh, gosh, this is not good. Try it again.
I have to go back. One of the problems with these data is they depend a great deal on surveys.
As you know, there are very few countries in the poorer part of the developing world which have got proper registration systems,
which are called births and deaths and other events as they happen in an accurate way.
To a very large extent, the data which I am presenting here depend upon a series of massive, scientifically validated surveys.
There is a demographic and health surveys which are mounted every few years in about 40 plus countries of the world.
And if you happen to be interested in the details of what's going on in these countries,
then looking at demographic and health surveys on the Web will give you access to a marvellous variety of data, not just on demography,
but also on their economy, marriage patterns, contraceptive use,
educational level and all the rest of it with tables which you can make up for
yourselves and graphs to and maps in a very straightforward user-friendly fashion.
Anyway, the they depend upon the demographic and health service a very large extent in the absence of complete voter registration.
And these is the message we get from the higher fertility countries are frankly a bit mixed and not that easy to understand and illustrate
the the complexity of people's attitudes and values in relation to family size and the difficulty which we have sometimes in making sense.
So, for example, if you look at this table, you can see that in in Niger and Mali, the TFR is about seven.
Not that many people don't want any more children. As expected, ideal family size in Niger is reported to be even higher than the current.
Rather remarkable level of fertility rate is pretty robust also in Mali.
But if you look down at the those countries where the birth rate is a bit lower,
you still see the contrast between the fact of the ideal family size is about the same as the actual reported birth rate or even higher than it is.
But at the same time that there is also reported quite a high proportion, 37 percent in Ghana, 57 percent in Cambodia,
20 percent in Congo and Nigeria and Cameroon, who want no more children with corresponding proportions of reported unmet need of a family planning.
So is it paradoxical? People have retained, it seems, an ideal family size which they no longer want actually to realise in practise.
So it would appear. In some of these countries, the the future growth appears to be fairly inexorable.
This is a probabilistic projection from the 2010 United Nations population projections of Niger.
The individual grey lines, which you see are the tracks of each individual stochastic projection,
which I think I've described you before, as being a form of projection, a runner on a Monte Carlo method,
which involves which incorporates random distributions of of of next levels of birth and death rates based upon a fact based probability distribution,
which give one alternate possibilities. The less likely ones are less frequent, the more likely ones are more frequent.
So you've got this fancy with a higher density in the middle and outliers on the edge.
And the median is this red on the median of all a thousand or 10000 of the projections which are run on the stochastic basis.
And they all point to a very rapid growth of population in Niger, partly because of the very high level of current fertility,
the tremendous population momentum built up in the age structure, plus incorporating an assumption about fertility decline.
This is not business as usual. This incorporates fertility decline. It's still shows high growth.
Was that a yes in the seeming contradiction?
We can go back in one direction, said a small number of people having lots of children and many others, but having less than that still.
Uh, the statue was still with the idea of.
Given we're dealing with averages, I'm not quite sure why that would make an effect, certainly as as as birthrates go down,
then those parts of the population which favour large families,
you've got large families that's become more important and probably slow down the rate of decline.
We'll come on to that in a moment. I haven't quite got my head around how your proposal would work after the ruling.
No, no, no. I wouldn't say you were. On the other hand, there are others were fertility decline anyway?
This is fertility, not population, does appear to be uninterrupted if slow.
This is Ferghana and the unevenness in the graph in the hatch lines, which are the actual data,
arrives from the slightly different kind of response you get in successive demographic and health
services and other sorts of information which we get from from 1980 up to the present time.
As a consequence of the uncertainty about future birthrates, the population size of the world, therefore, is really rather uncertain as well.
These are some very wide ranging, very absurdly,
really long term projections for the United Nations based upon different assumptions about total fertility with and also an
assumption about a very favourable further increase in survival up to an expectation of life at birth of one hundred for both sexes.
By no means off limits for countries in the developed world, but probably a bit ambitious, at least for the next 100 years or so.
For much of the developing world, as you see, if the birthrate goes out at one point five,
which for some countries now have, then even by 2100, by the end of the century,
it will be down to seven billion gone up and down to the present level,
a TFR to it'll it'll stabilise at just under 11 billion and with various others in the in between.
And this is the global probabilistic projection done on the same basis as that one for Niger,
which I showed you with the median line in white showing the decline.
This is according to Lutz and his colleagues who are more favourable to the view
that global population will overall in declined by the end of the century.
Most of the action, as we all know, is going to be in the least developed regions of the green part of the graph in tropical Africa,
and that's going to be where the population dynamic is going to be.
And here are some of the more exciting countries in terms of projected population growth by the United Nations,
all of which assume a reduction in the birthrate. These are not constant rate projections.
And as you see that the all those countries on the left hand side put together.
Our project to almost increase by a factor of three by mid century from the present time,
and some of them like newsier, much more, others like Yemen a little bit less.
On the other hand, perhaps the more interesting thing is the perhaps less well known fact of the quite rapid growth of the proportion of people in the
world who are going to be living in countries where the birthrate is is one replacement and where population is actually in decline.
These are projections, again, from the UN showing a country is now classified as part of the of the developing world,
except for Japan and Taiwan and of course, in rough rank order when they're supposed to tip into population decline.
Japan is in brackets because it already has dipped into population decline.
Taiwan is certain to follow in the next 15 years or so.
South Korea shortly afterwards, China itself by about two thousand and 140 or thereabouts,
and then perhaps some unexpected ones who thought that Mexico and Brazil would be in that group.
Thailand, less and less surprisingly. So, Iran, also Turkey, Indonesia and Vietnam all together.
This adds up to about two point four billion people, which is really a very important chunk of the world's population, to which,
of course, you've got to add the nearly one billion people in the developed world who are going to be also in a similar position already.
As you know, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, other countries in Eastern Europe have tipped into population decline and Germany is more interesting.
Italy probably going to follow quite shortly.
So it really is a bit of a cascade of population tipping into this position of decline with all of the problems,
the problems and possibilities of population decline, which I tried to outline earlier on this week.
In talking about these countries, it's often easy to forget,
as I think Philip Krieger pointed out to you the other week, that countries, some countries,
especially in the developing world, are very big,
very diverse and warlike empires and countries and different people in them behave in very different ways.
This is the example of India. I'm not sure how well known it is that if you draw a line across the middle of India like here,
then and cut the country roughly in half and the southern half the states in the southern half
all have got birth rates below the level required to replace the population in the long run.
Those are most of the ones in the left hand column of that table that far less than two point one Kerala,
Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra and various others, one or two up here as well in north of India.
Typically higher. As you see some some up to two, about four like Jihad and top the by the north.
Really great contrast arising out of all sorts of contrasts of culture and economy,
which are not very long standing in India, which Tim and his colleagues drew attention to 20 or 30 years ago.
And so when talking about Indian TFR, we have to keep in mind that it's a very it's a very heterogeneous population and
the birth rates and rates of growth in different components are very unequal.
Somewhat similar pattern in many other developing countries, here is Mexico,
the the low fertility regions, here are the blue ones, the higher fertility ones, the pink and red ones.
One of the consequences, of course, of this is that generally speaking, as the the birth rates become divergent,
then those populations in those countries which got the higher birth rates tend to become more numerically dominant.
They increase faster in numbers than those which are limiting their fertility more as a consequence of the rate of change of population growth.
The rate of change of fertility tends to slow down in an adverse fashion.
And you can see that in this graph of the Mexican TFR of the initial high level of reduction is not being followed at the present time.
It's still projected to become below replacement, but progress is slower than it was and one might see the same thing in Turkey.
Here are some remarkable regional variation in Turkey. Here is here in Syria and neighbouring.
This is the Mediterranean Sea. It should become a blue. It's not here as Greece on the left.
Here, the the darker the province, the higher the birth rate, and you can see from the scale over here,
these provinces over here, which are mostly a Kurdistan and which are the least developed part of Turkey in the east,
have got to OSWIN five and seven, which you will recall is about the same at its higher level as we have in Niger and and Chad and Mauritania.
These are African levels of fertility. And over here, we've got some replacement ones more typical of Europe.
In fact, the distinguished Turkish demographer, Professor Abbott and Unknot pointed out that if you go to Ankara,
which is about here somewhere, and drop a line down to the sea, in her words, to the west of that line, it's Europe.
To the east of that line is Africa. She was talking about not just demography, but also social development of cultural progress,
of various kinds, literacy education and modern attitudes and all of that.
It's a very, very diverse country in that respect.
Stalls, fertility declines have become something of a focus of interest in the last 10 years, some of them, I think, not surprisingly,
arising out of this heterogeneity of demographic behaviour in different parts of the same large country,
others apparently rather more general than having somewhat different causes.
Once again, there's a problem of being certain about whether Stoll's are actually happening,
rising out of the rather episodic nature of the data which we're getting.
If we're getting data from that demographic and health survey is held every three or four years,
then of course, it may be that if one of those surveys is a slightly off,
a bit unrepresentative or reflects some some temporary glitch in behaviour,
it may give the impression there's a stall when there isn't really when things are already going down.
And a recent paper in 2010 certainly identified Kenya as being one clear example up to that date anyway,
where fertility declines have stopped and probably been in Rwanda and Zambia,
amongst two others, had also in the same category, maybe not the others that are listed above.
Here's here's an example of of Kenia.
This is the TFR, up to age 39, up to 2005.
I think it is showing a reasonably regular decline from the 1980s down to 1995.
And then and then it's been flatlining both in the rural areas and the dark and also in the urban areas in the in the pale light here.
So not good news. And here is an example of an example of one of the underlying factors behind that contraceptive use is flatlined.
Contraceptive use here is, is is the blue line increasing from more or less zero in the 1970s,
up to about zero, the 1970s, up to about 30 percent by the last decade.
And they're not showing any further progress. What the next survey will show because we don't know.
But so far, no progress. And that's that's clearly associated with flat flatlining of the fertility rate.
No further progress. Evidence that time with considerable implications for the future population of Kenya.
And here are some other examples. I don't want to dwell on them in detail from Benin, Zambia and Tanzania.
You can see that typically speaking, the the urban TFR, the pill line is lower than the rural one,
as you would expect, not as much as perhaps one might expect from from from general principles.
It's one of the features of African demography.
The urban total fertility is by no means as low as you would expect them to be compared to the rural ones.
When you look at the rest of the developing world.
Urbanisation, Africa is often very rather different nature than urbanisation in the developing world in particular,
not so much driven by modernisation of the economy or by any kind of industrialisation,
but to some extent by people finding refuge from an overpopulation or unproductive rural, poverty stricken environment.
The causes of these stalled or slow declines are somewhat controversial.
One of them certainly got to do with with a weak political commitment to family planning programmes.
And there are some governments in Africa like Mr. Museveni is in Uganda, which are committed to higher population growth.
And we don't regard a low fertility as being a priority at all.
Quite the reverse. There's that.
There's the point that as well as rather as in in in Western Europe,
as the birth rates have ceased to decline in Western Europe and started to go up because
of the decades of postponement have been replaced by some recuperation of fertility.
This can also be expected to take place in the developing world as well.
One of the components of lower birth rates in the developing world is the way in which not only of completed family size has gone down,
but also that births have been postponed as more and more women move into education,
as more and more women move into the paid paid work sector, then just as in the developed world.
So also the developing world childbearing is put off once it can be put off through
family planning and also wants norms of later marriage start to take take her late.
Marriage is a very important component of declining fertility in the Third World.
In some countries, probably responsible about a third of the fall in the birthrate, which we observe so far.
I mentioned the failure to meet unmet need arising out of the reduction of the harvest, in fact,
and support of family planning programmes in money terms and also in some parts of the world, there are still very restrictive abortion laws.
Whatever you may think of it, abortion has been a very important component of fertility decline in many parts of the world.
Laws against abortion in many African countries and in some of those two are very strict.
There may not be by any means observed. Nonetheless, they appear to have an effect.
On the other side of things,
the opposite of all those factors generate a rapid declines in the birth rate and we have seen that in a number of countries, including, of course,
the role of family planning programmes where these have taken a grip, where they have been,
where they have enjoyed government support, where they've been well planned and well well financed.
There's a case of saying they have had quite an important effect in bringing down the birthrate.
I will look at that next week.
One of the most important of these is the acceleration of education and also of broadcast media, which to some extent a short cut,
the need for literacy, where everyone has access to a transistor radio, where most villages anyway have access to television coverage.
Youssef Kobar showed in North Africa that that the rate of reduction of the birth of the birth rate in North Africa was much faster than expected,
and future population growth, therefore more modest than expected. If you factor in the variable of education,
if you factor in the fact that the higher and higher proportion of every successive cohort is going on to secondary education and tertiary education,
given the well-known relationship or certainly Hillsborough in North Africa between a higher education and a lower birth rates,
it's only if you regard education as being a static proportion of each of each cohort that you get lower sorry,
higher projections of fertility and higher projections of population in that and other parts of the world.
In fact, Lutz is so keen on the notion that education is the key to the spread of education,
is the key to accelerating reduction in birth rates that he thinks ought to be
incorporated as a kind of formal fourth dimension in demographic analysis.
This is. An example of the projection of the population of working age by level of education in different parts of the world,
showing how one might expect would have had an effect upon upon future levels of facility here.
The Dark Band is tertiary education, the middle grade band in secondary education.
And The Pale Band is is primary. And the white band is none at all.
And looking at looking at as South Asia, we see very rapid changes projected for the future with corresponding rapid changes in the birthrate,
sub-Saharan Africa, some change resulting from a very much lower base on the right hand at the bottom.
And in China, very high level of saturation already evident, not much future.
Affects there, because it's almost saturated already, this grotty series of graphs is a simulation of the likely effects of different levels of
the penetration of education into the population on the future of population size of India.
The left hand graph at the top shows the population pyramid of India at present levels of educational participation rates with.
Primary education being being in pay grade and secondary education in Korea and the black is is tertiary for the future,
if if the pattern of education remains the same and each cohort has the same pattern of education as it moves up,
then we have quite a high level of population because the population pyramid not really becoming Asian at all,
whereas if education participation rates expand so that the proportion of those,
the primary education diminishes with successive cohorts proportional, the second education increases and portion of tertiary increases,
a lot of them get much more rapid, further decline, much more rapid ageing of the population as well,
but also ipso facto, a much faster moderation of the population growth of India.
And in those countries where there's been very successful economic development and population policies,
at the same time they've moved themselves out of the developing world into the developed world very fast indeed.
Back in the 1950s, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan were all developing countries.
They were all poor. The level of GDP per head in those countries back here was about the same as in very many African countries.
It was not different from any other part of the world and important way since then,
of course, enormous levels of economic growth, 10 percent per year in many cases.
I think the record was 13 percent in the 1970s per year in in Singapore have transformed the economy,
transformed the society, transformed the education level and transformed the birth rate.
Now they are all down at a very low level indeed. And that raises some interesting questions as to what the future might be like in this place.
This is to illustrate the importance of of the fight for marriage by women in urban Asia, which which in these countries is almost all of them.
The graph on the left shows in Korea, the high proportion of women who are who are not married, different ages,
59 percent, still unmarried in their late 20s, which is highly unusual for that part of the world.
A really new development even amongst those age 30 to 34, 19 percent said unmarried.
And of course, these are societies in which births outside marriage are complete.
No, no cohabitation may be spreading. Births outside marriage are still two percent of the total and are deeply frowned upon.
So that goes hand in hand with a really severe restriction on the birthrate, which you saw in the previous graph.
And even in some of the less developed parts of Asia, we see high proportions of women unmarried at quite advanced ages.
The dark bars here are percent of women unmarried at age 30 to 34 and the scale of zero to thirty five percent.
The Pilbara are women not married at age 40 to forty four.
And these are countries don't forget where in the past as proportions unmarried at age at age 40 would
be about two or three percent of voters unmarried age 30 would have about two or three percent.
And now we have youth in Jakarta at, what, 15 or 12 percent, unmarried at age 30 and 34.
In Singapore, it's about 22 percent. In Hong Kong, it's about 27 percent.
In Bangkok, it's about 33 percent to 35 percent.
Really quite startling proportions of the remaining unmarried and therefore childless.
One of the consequences, of course, is going to be very rapid population ageing,
and while the level of population ageing in these ultra rapidly developing countries like Singapore and Taiwan and South Korea is unlikely to be well,
cannot really be emulated by any other country in the world.
Nonetheless, in the longer term, something of this kind will happen to all of them if their birthrates to send to the same level.
Is that is that likely? Well, there are some interesting clues from China that in some parts of China and in some
and for some categories of person where the one child family rule no longer applies,
where individuals are free to choose to, in many cases it appears that they do not wish to have to.
They are now not only do not wish to have to,
but also in practise that they are not producing to the in this province in China, where the policy does not apply.
The TFR is about one in Shanghai, a one child family preference appears to have become normalised as these data show,
it is not yet clear if this is a hangover of the one child policy that the power,
the one child policy and and the previous family limitation policy in 1970s
has become so embedded in the culture that people simply do not think about
about larger families anymore that it's possibly an example of evolving Lutzes facility trappin operation and therefore it's rather peculiar to China.
Or is it possible this is something which will become normal, at least for a while,
in urban Asia in general, where the culture does not encourage cohabitation?
And so a marriage where the physical conditions of life in the rapidly developed cities with rather cramped
physical accommodation is highly unhelpful for the point of view of producing a family of more than one child.
And therefore it may not be rather broad a factor function, rather,
of the kind of urban life which is developed in in Asia very rapidly over the last few decades rather than more gradually,
as in other parts of the world. That remains unclear. But the the it is a possibility and it's becoming.
Built into the United Nations population projections, which very interestingly are now suggesting that all sorts of rather unexpected
countries at a national level may fall down to a total level of of TFR,
quite well below the level currently observed in northwest Europe.
So the odd possibility arises of the TFR in most countries of the world,
except perhaps a tropical Africa falling below the level that we see in this country,
even in some of the Arab countries, in Asian countries, in Latin America and so on,
if that apparently inexorable general decline of TFR continues into the future here.
Here is a graph taken from. From the preliminary work for the U.N. population projections, the pink line is about one point eighty five.
The blue line is the US TFR. And here we have projections of the TFR in a number of countries in the developing
world at the present time showing what the UN thinks is going to happen.
You see, by about 2040 to 2050, TFR in Indonesia, Bangladesh,
Uzbekistan and Algeria are all reckoned to be well below replacement, down to about one point five, one point six.
You may think this is daft and fantasy, but that's that's what the UN model modelling suggests.
And that's what some some sort of cultural influences might suggest as well.
If, after all, almost all the countries outside Europe have got a sort of families culture with a gender relations which go hand in hand with that,
insofar as MacDonald is right and high levels of gender inequity tend to go hand in hand with very low birthrates,
at least for a while, until the culture changes, then you might expect this to happen even in the less likely countries of the world.
Here here is here are another example of the perhaps rather surprising projection of the TFI in Oman, one of the least developed to the Gulf states.
Will go down to about one point five by 2050 and and leave, as you see here, Denmark, France,
Australia and other countries with the highest birth rates in the world, again, with the exception of tropical Africa and a few others.
Well, an intriguing possibility. The messages are rather mixed.
Generally speaking, fertility rates, a decline seem inexorable.
There's no lower limit yet apparent in the low birth rates, which some of the developing countries of the contemporary world have achieved.
In others that there is there is population still low fertility, still very few others, hardly any movement apparent at all.
And so the pattern seems to imply considerable diversity, but with a preponderance towards low birth rates, leading, of course,
to the expectation both in the UN projections long term and particularly in these
probabilistic projections of global population decline by before the end of the century.
What's going to happen in certain specific countries like Egypt, Argentina, Bangladesh and Kenya, we still see remains to be seen.
We'll have to wait until what the next fertility surveys show us to be the case.
When I saw the stop, there just would change within time, so thank you very much and I will be back again on Thursday.