Published on
Updated
Reading 1 min.
Fertility is insufficient to maintain the population as it is in the majority of countries, underlines a vast study published Thursday, warning of imbalances which appear to be increasingly marked from one region of the world to another .
“Fertility declines across the world“, summarizes this work published in the scientific journal The Lancet, noting that more than half of the countries already observe a fertility rate that is too low to maintain the level of their population.
And “In the future, fertility rates will continue to decline across the world“, he adds.
The study is based on figures from the Global Burden of Disease, a vast program financed by the American Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and aimed at bringing together health data from most countries.
The researchers not only assessed current fertility rates in these countries, but also sought to calculate future developments based on numerous predictive variables, such as education levels or infant mortality.
They conclude that by 2050, three-quarters of countries will have insufficient fertility rates to maintain their populations. By 2100, most countries will be affected.
Researchers also predict that the population of poor countries will continue to increase for a long time, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, while it will decline in developed countries. This imbalance risks, according to them, having “considerable economic and societal consequences“.
This work takes place in a context where many countries are concerned about the evolution of their population, such as France, where President Emmanuel Macron has called for “demographic rearmament”.
However, the predictions of the Lancet study must be taken with caution, underline researchers from the World Health Organization (WHO) in the same issue.
They criticize several choices of methodology, highlighting in particular the weakness of the data currently available in many poor countries. And, basically, “we must favor nuance and not sensationalism when we talk about the decline in fertility rates“, they estimate.
They also emphasize that such a phenomenon can present advantages (environment, food, etc.), as well as disadvantages (retirement systems, employment, etc.). And especially note that there “not obviously“to act on it.