The Daily Update: No Baby Boom

There has always been the light-hearted speculation that there would be a spike in the birth rates nine months after a ‘stuck at home’ event, like a blizzard or blackout, or a lockdown. However, COVID-19 has been much more than a temporary lockdown. It has led to massive economic loss for a large percentage of people, and even for those who have not seen this there is still the insecurity and lack of confidence. When this happens, there is not a baby boom, rather the polar opposite.

The Brookings Institution believes evidence is suggesting there could be a decline in births in the US in the order of 300,000 to 500,000 this year. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report indicates an 8% drop in births in the month of December alone. Historically, economic crises have never been the preferred time for people to decide to have children. The millions of jobs lost or just the threat of losing work, mean even if a couple are not directly affected, create a climate of great uncertainty, which puts family projects on hold.

It is not just the US that is seeing a drop in those having a baby. A survey of fertility plans in Europe also showed 50% of people in Germany and France who had planned to have a child in 2020 were going to postpone it. There was a birth rate decline in Italy of just over 21.5% at the beginning of this year and Spain is reporting its lowest birth rate since records began - a decline of 20%. In Italy 37% said they had given up altogether on the idea of having kids. Nine months on from the start of the pandemic France, Korea, Taiwan, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have all reported monthly birth figures for December or January that were their lowest in more than 20 years.

Of course it has been well reported (and written about by SSC) with research in November ’18 that even before COVID hit globally the fertility rate had halved since 1950, although there are big variations. Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Cyprus, are barely averaging one child per woman, whilst Niger in Africa the average is over 7. The Office for National Statistics put the birth rate here in the UK at 1.76.

Even the world's largest population is not immune. In 2029 China’s population will total 1.44bln people, however, that will be the peak according to the China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in a report, thereafter China will begin an ‘unstoppable’ decline. If current rates are maintained (China stopped its one-child policy a few years ago) by 2050 the population will be 1.36bln, and just 15 years later 1.17bln. By 2035 China’s elderly population will have reached 400mln. The UN estimates that India will overtake China by 2024 as the world’s most populous country (some reports say that it has already happened) and that by the end of this century, over 80% of the world’s population will live in either Asia or Africa.