(CN) — The coming century will see simultaneous "baby booms" and "baby busts" around the globe, researchers with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle predict in a study released Wednesday that echoes numerous studies of global demography over the last several years.
The authors of the study, published in The Lancet, say these booms and busts reflect worldwide changes in countries' "total fertility rate," a measure of how many children a woman or birthing person has over their lifetime.
"As most of the world contends with the serious challenges to the economic growth of a shrinking workforce and how to care for and pay for ageing populations, many of the most resource-limited countries in sub-Saharan Africa will be grappling with how to support the youngest, fastest-growing population on the planet in some of the most politically and economically unstable, heat-stressed, and health system-strained places on earth," the institute's Stein Emil Vollset, a senior author of the paper, said.
Sub-Saharan Africa will likely see the largest baby booms, the researchers predict, with more than half of all the world's live births occurring in the region by 2100. Populations could sharply decline in global north regions like western Europe, the U.S. and Japan — last year the Japanese government predicted that by 2100 the country's current population of about 123 million people could be cut in half. Other areas that could see declining birth rates include Saudi Arabia, much of south Asia, and southern cone of South America.
The global population will grow despite these demographic shifts, potentially peaking at over 10 billion people by the turn of the 22nd century, according to 2022 U.N. projections. But the unequal distribution of birth rates could have profound implications for global society, the researchers argued, presenting both challenges and opportunities for nations around the world.
“The implications are immense,” said Natalia Bhattacharjee, the study's co-lead author and also a researcher with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation said in a statement. “These future trends in fertility rates and live births will completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power and will necessitate reorganizing societies."
In the global north, contracting populations and birth rates could reduce labor pools and place stress on the remaining working-age adults to support a ballooning elderly cohort. But they could also improve global ecological health. The global north has an outsized per-capita energy footprint compared to the global south — a given Icelander used more than 450 times the amount of energy a given Chadian used in 2022 — and a "low-growth" future could cut global carbon emissions by 40% by 2100.
An Oxford University study from 2018 alternatively suggested that a growth of African nations' domestic consumer economies and regional integrational, driven in part by a young and growing population, could help alleviate poverty in the region and build up the political power of local governments — though it conceded that gains from a focus on domestic economic growth and integration might develop extremely slowly and would not benefit everyone equally.
Declining birth rates can also be seen as a success for women's rights, the paper's authors said, signaling increased control by women around the world over their bodies and lives.
“In many ways, tumbling fertility rates are a success story, reflecting not only better, easily available contraception but also many women choosing to delay or have fewer children, as well as more opportunities for education and employment," Vollset said.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the predicted baby booms could stress the infrastructure of many nations that already face interconnected challenges presented by climate change, poverty and the sociopolitical legacies of colonialism. But as Bhattacharjee pointed out, the region's increased population could also help reconfigure the global balance of power in its favor.
While study authors briefly encouraged increased access by women in sub-Saharan Africa to contraceptives and education, the paper also pointed out the necessity of reducing numbers of hypothetical individuals "born into severely heat-stressed, politically fragile, economically weak environments" over the issue of women's reproductive rights itself.
At the moment, some Africa observers — and U.N. officials — argue the global north maintains neocolonial relationships to sub-Saharan Africa, vis-a-vis Euro-American dominated financial institutions like the Washington D.C.-headquartered World Bank and International Monetary Fund. There is also the influence on the continent that former colonial nations and associated private corporations still hold — see the notion of Françafrique, and the 2023 coup in Niger which saw a new government come to power in the former French colony amid a wave of anti-French sentiment.
Bhattacharjee urged governments facing declining birthrates to also accept African immigrants in the future in order to keep their own economies afloat.
"Sub-Saharan African countries have a vital resource that ageing societies are losing: a youthful population,” she argued.
She further promoted pro-natal support policies such as "enhanced parental leave, free childcare, financial incentives, and extra employment rights" to help young families in countries with declining birthrates.
Regardless of how individual regions fare in the coming population shifts, the study's authors also collectively argued for universal access to contraceptives and education.
These are "fundamental human rights that the world should be working towards for all populations regardless of their outcomes on fertility, society and the economy," they said.
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