The State of Global Fertility

South Korea, together with Hong Kong, Macau and Puerto Rico, is one of only a few places in the world with a fertility rate below 1, data by the World Bank shows.

In Japan, another Asian country known to struggle with low birth rates, average births per woman remained at 1.2 in 2023. This places the country among the more than 90 in the world where populations are not growing independent of immigration. Also in this group are many nations from Europe, the Americas and Southeast Asia. Most of the countries losing fertility are better developed and reasons for the trend include greater access to contraception and more women being educated and heading to work.

The story is different in the developing world where higher rates of fertility are fueling continued global population growth. Somalia, Chad, Niger and the Democratic Republic of the Congo had a fertility rates of 6.1 in 2023, the highest in the world, followed by the Central African Republic and Mali. Out of the 31 countries in the world where women had 4 or more children on average, 29 were in Africa that year.

On average, women in 1963 were having 5.3 children in their lifetime and by 2023, that had more than halved to 2.2. During the same period, the global population rose by around 150 percent from 3.2 billion to 8.1 billion. The fact that populations kept (and keep) growing despite falling global fertility is tied to longer life expectancy and lower childhood mortality. The UN expects global fertility to reach the minumum replacement level of 2.1 by the middle of the century while global population is expected to start falling towards the end of it.