Demography - ReviseSociology

The global decline in fertility rates: causes and consequences

The global birth rate is declining due to various factors such as economic insecurity and high living costs, leading to concerns about an ageing population and economic strain on welfare systems. Attempts to boost birth rates through government policies have had limited success. Family-friendly policies and immigration are suggested solutions, but social trends are hard to reverse.

Birth rates are dropping almost everywhere. Two-thirds of the world’s population now lives in countries where the total fertility rate (TFR) – a measure of births per woman per lifetime – has dropped below 2.1, the number needed to keep the population constant.

According the to World Bank Open Data, the global TFR reached 2.3 in 2021; it will soon drop below the 2.1 replacement rate if it hasn’t already.

In the Europe and the UK the rate stands at 1.5 and 1.49 respectively. In East Asia, it is 1.2 and Latin America 1.9.

As recently as 2017 the UN was predicting the world’s population would climb to 11.2 billion by 2100. The UN now predicts it will peak at 10.4 billion in 2080. After this point it will start declining. This is from 8 billion today.

This decline could, in fact, happen decades earlier.

This will be the first such global-population decline since the Black Death in the Middle Ages. ‘The demographic winter is coming’ said Jesus Fernandez- Villarde of the University of Pennsylvania.

Why is the birth rate dropping?

This could be due to problems such as increasing economic insecurity, and the high cost of living, especially housing and childcare.

However fertility rates almost always come down when nations reach a certain level of economic and social development. This is known as ‘demographic transition’.

How do patterns vary globally?

Declining fertility used to be seen as a rich countries problem and to some extent it still is. The highest fertility rates in the world, of around five or six births, are in sub-Saharan countries such as Niger, Angola, and DRC. But now even poorer states have seen sharp falls in their fertility rates. In India, for example, the TFR fell to 2 in 2020!

graph showing declining fertility rates in different regions

Why are people worried?

There are two main concerns.

People are having fewer children than they want. Polls suggest that UK women on average want between two and three children.

Second is the consequences for the dependency ratio. The dependency ratio is the number of people of working age relative the number of people not of working age (children and retired people).

A shrinking population means that more jobs will go unfilled and economic dynamism will reduce. The most immediate fear is that welfare systems will be underfunded. They rely on working age people to fund them, after all.

Today the G7 richest economies have roughly three people of working age for everyone one over 65, but by 2050 they will have fewer than two.

In South Korea, the national pension fund is expected to run out of cash by 2055. South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world at 0.72.

Can birth rates be boosted?

Governments are trying but nothing has been very effective.

Japan has experimented with childcare subsidies and stipends since the 1990s. Its fertility rate climbed from 1.26 in 2005 to 1.45 in 2015. But then sank to 1.2 again by 2023.

South Korea has invested a staggering $270 billion in fertility initiatives since 2006 but its birth rates keep declining.

In France Macron has offered better paid parental leave and fertility check ups. However this hasn’t changed anything.

Hungary has had some success. It spends 5% of GDP trying to prop up the birth rate. It provides three years of parental leave to mothers and lifelong exemption from income tax for women who have a child before aged 30. And loans of $36K which are written off for couples who have at least three children and a subsidised minivan. And free IVF to women, but not single women or lesbians. Hungary’s birth rate has increased from 1.2 in 2011 to 1.5 today.

Extreme right-wing policies boost birth rates

In Romania inn 1966 NC decree 770 removed contraception from sale and abortion was restricted, the fertility rate jumped from 1.9 to 3.7 within a year.

Do family friendly policies help?

Some of the world’s lowest fertility rates are in nations where women play an important role in the workplace, but where traditional gender roles have endured, and where there has been little provision for maternity or paternity leave.

For example, Japan, South Korea, Italy (1.2) and Taiwan (0.8) all have very low birth rates.

But eventhe most family friendly nations have low fertility rates such as Finland (1.32) Norway (1.4) and Sweden (1.45)

It seems the social trends behind low fertility are hard to reverse.

Net migration to the UK increasing!

Net migration to the UK reached 600 000 in December 2022, up more than 50% since December 2018.

graph showing net migration to the UK 2018. to2022

Since Brexit net migration from the EU has been declining, with around 50 000 more EU Citizens leaving the UK than entering; and the increase in net migration is driven entirely from non-EU countries, especially Nigeria, Bangladesh and India.

Reasons for Migration to the UK

The main reason for the recent increase in migration is more people coming to study in the UK, and much of that is driven by the dependent partners and children of students coming to join them.

After that, work is the main reason, with people coming in the take up jobs in sectors of our labour market where there are vacancies, such as health and social care and seasonal agricultural work.

bar chart showing reasons for migration to the UK 2018 to 2022

2022 also saw more humanitarian sources of migration with more than 100 000 refugees come to the UK from the Ukraine and more from Hong Kong.

Analysis

Immigration is a sensitive political issue, with 60% of the UK population thinking it is too high according to YouGov tracking (2).

However it is also clear that we need immigration to fill gaps in the job market and a lot of the increase from 2021 to 2022 was about doing just that.

Also, very few people believe we took in too few refugees from Ukraine so people are not outright opposed to migration.

Finally, the figures are somewhat skewed by students coming the UK to study for three years, and bringing their dependents…. most of these will return home after study, and while they are here they are paying huge fees to British universities which should benefit the UK economy: they are basically paying to be here!

From a policy perspective, however, such levels of net migration to the UK are the highest on record, which suggests a profound failure of government policy given that every PM since 2010 has been elected on the promise of bringing net migration down, which simply hasn’t happened.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This material is primarily relevant to the demography topic, which is part of the families and households module.

Sources

Census UK (accessed May 2023) Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending December 2022

(2) YouGov: attitudes to immigration tracker.

Life Expectancy in England is Stalling

Life expectancy has been steadily increasing since 1900, but this trend seems to be stalling, according to the recent Marmot Review of Health Equity.

You can clearly see the slow down in the increase in Life Expectancy for males and females in England in the two graphs below.

For both males and females the graph above shows a clear increasing trend from 2001 to around 2011, and then a much flatter trend from 2011 to 2017.

The above two graphs also highlight the clear correlation between deprivation and life expectancy, with the least deprived (or wealthiest) quintile of males and females enjoying around 6-8 more years of life than the most deprived (or poorest) quintile.

You can’t see it from the above graphs, but the poorest decile (the poorest tenth) of women actually experienced a slight decline in life expectancy in recent years. That is to say the very poorest women now die younger.

Declining healthy life expectancy

The report also highlights a small decline in healthy life expectancy, which I personally think is important to consider, given that it’s much more desirable to live a longer life in good health, compared to a longer life in poor health!

How do we explain the stalling of life expectancy?

The Marmot report says that an increase in deaths from winter illnesses such as flu in recent years can only explain about 20% of the decline in life expectancy.

The report also highlights funding cuts to health and social services as something which has ‘undermined the ability of local authorities to improve the social determinants of health’.

NB – note that the wording of the above is very careful, the report doesn’t say that funding cuts have caused a decrease in the rate of improvement of life expectancy, probably because the report doesn’t have sufficient data to infer a significant enough correlation between funding cuts and life expectancy trends.

So while the trends may be objective, we need to be careful about jumping to conclusions about why life expectancy is stalling!

One thing we can say is that inequality clearly hasn’t improved in the last 20 years, if we use differences as life expectancy as an indicator of this!

Relevance to A-level sociology

This is useful as an update to explaining trends in the death rate!

Why are Americans Dying Younger?

Life Expectancy in the U.S. has fallen for the last three years in a row, which is yet further supporting evidence that the United States might actually be a less developed country.

The decline is driven by the increasing death rates in young Americans, aged between 25 to 64, which the main causes of death being ‘deaths of despair’ – alcohol and drug related deaths, suicides, obesity and drugs linked to chronic stress.

Interestingly the high death rates cut across class, gender and ethnic lines, and all regions of the United States.

Why does America have such a high mid-life mortality rate?

America has one of the highest mid-life mortality rates of high income countries, despite spending more on heath care than most other countries.

The statistics tell a depressing tale – mortality from drug overdoses has increased by around 400% since the late 1990s and Obesity rates have increased dramatically too – men now way on average 30 pounds more than they did 50 years ago.

In short, the causes of high mid life mortality are that people are just making destructive life choices and choosing not to take care of themselves, with increasing numbers of people self-medicating with alcohol, drugs (both illegal and legal) and junk-food.

There are number of possible deeper economic and social explanations as to the increasing mid-life death rate in America – we could apply Strain Theory – it could be that the people making the above choices are experiencing a sense of ‘anomie’ – these are people just working to survive with no obvious chance of ‘succeeding’.

It could also be that America is one of the most unequal countries on earth – and while many struggle to survive, they see daily success stories on the media, which enhances the sense of relative deprivation and their own failure.

Or these people self-medicating may be successful in some ways – have successful careers, but they’ve sacrificed their families because of it, so these could be deaths due to to loneliness or social isolation.

Whatever the causes, I’m just glad I don’t live in the US!

Find out more:

If you want to find out more, read this November 2019 article from The Washington Post.

Finally, don’t forget the useful application of this material to the demography section of the families and household module!

Hungary’s tax break for breeders

Hungary’s Right Wing government recently announced a new social policy exempting women who have more than four children from income tax for life.

There are also other financial incentives designed to encourage families to have more children – such as loans of up to £27,000 which will be partially or fully written off if the couple go on to have two or three children.

The stated aim of the policy is to reverse the country’s population decline so that Hungary does not have to rely on migrant workers in the future.

The Prime Minister, Victor Orban stated that women having fewer and fewer children was a problem all over Western Europe, and that the solution tended to be to increasingly rely on immigrants in the future, to replace the ‘missing’ native children. Orban believes that Hungarians would rather have Hungarians working in the future rather than immigrants.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This is an unusual example of a right wing (New Right) policy explicitly designed to encourage marriage and the more babies being born (it seems within nuclear families).

At the same time it is pro-nationalist and and anti-immigration, hence anti-globalisation.

I guess from a narrow minded ‘Hungary first’ Nationalist perspective if makes sense in a ‘defend our boarders’ sort of way.

Unfortunately in itself it’s going to do nothing to actually stem the flow of migrants to Europe from poorer non-European countries, and neither is it going to do anything to curb global population growth – surely from a globalist/ environmentalist perspective what we need is wealthier countries having fewer babies, and more migrants from areas where the birth rate is still high to fill jobs in developing countries in the future?

This is a great example of an unusual family policy, quite extreme in nature, and also a good example of how short-sited Nationalism is.

Exploring Inequality in Life Expectancy in the United Kingdom

What are the causes and consequences of low life expectancy in the UK?

Get rich or Die Young (BBC, Panorama 2018) explores the causes and consequences of low life expectancy in Teeside, in the North East of the United Kingdom. It focuses on the experiences of three people who are living through three of the main causes of low life expectancy: smoking and poor diet, drug addiction and mental ill health.

The documentary is hosted by the ever-reliable Richard Bilton, who seems to be the BBC’s go-to guy for these social injustice documentaries.

Teeside has the largest life expectancy gap in the country. Those in poorest boroughs of the region have a life expectancy of just 67, the same as Ethiopia. Those living just a couple of miles away in the wealthiest boroughs live until 85, 4 years above the national average.

This means that the life expectancy gap between the poorest and richest boroughs in Teeside is 18 years.

The inequalities are literally written on the gravestones, where in some graveyards, 60 years seems like a ‘good innings’

Richard Bilton points out early on that most babies in the U.K are born healthy, but a baby’s health is shaped by what comes next, and a crucial variable which influences health and life expectancy is wealth, or lack of it.

He also suggests more than once that leading an unhealthy life is not simply a matter of individuals making poor choices. Rather, being socialised into poverty restricts the kinds of choices people can make, and in extreme cases results in stress which seems to literally take 10 years off an individual’s life.

The first of the three emotionally charged case studies focuses on a 46-year-old male whose life is nearly over. He has fluid on the lungs, sciatica, and type 2 Diabetes, among other things, and is dependent on breathing apparatus.

There’s quite a lot of footage of his 4/5 kids musing about how he hasn’t got much time left…. And I guess that’s the ultimate negative consequence of his dying in his late 40s: a partner left to bring up 4 distraught kids on her own

His Illnesses are down to smoking and poor diet: people are four times more likely to smoke than those from wealthy areas.

The second case study focuses on a gran mother who is bringing up her daughters two children because she seems to be a hopeless crack addict. We see an interview with the drug-addict daughter who just appears to have given up the will to look after her kids. (Possibly because she knows her mother will do it?).

Drug deaths in Stockton have doubled in a decade and nationally they are substantially higher in the more deprived areas.

The grandmother attends a support group for grandparents who look after their grandkids because their children are drug addicts…. And we can see clearly how the stress she’s under is reducing her own life expectancy.

Finally, the documentary visits a middle-aged woman suffering from depression and anxiety who has made multiple (unsuccessful) suicide attempts. Suicides are twice as common in the poorest areas.

One of the problems here is that mental health services have been cut. There’s nowhere for her to go. If it were not for a voluntary support group, she’d probably be another early death statistic.

So how do we tackle low life expectancy?

This is a very short section towards the end of the documentary which visits a school in a deprived area. The headmistress of the Carmel Education Trust thinks she can turn things around. She doesn’t believe the poor-health life path of those in poverty is fixed.

She believes that therapies help kids to better at school, and if they do better at school, they get better jobs, and that seems to be the key to a healthier life…

NB the documentary doesn’t actually go into any depth about what these ‘therapies’ are. This section is very much tagged on the end of the gawp-fest.

Final critical appraisal of the documentary

What I like about the documentary is that it’s rooted in what you might call micro-statistics. It ‘digs down’ into the sub-regional variations in life expectancy in Teeside. It even distinguishes between life expectancy and health life expectancy.

If You rely on the Office for National Statistics own accessible data on life expectancy, you don’t even see these variations!

However, the documentary spends too much time ‘gawping’ at the poor sick poor people rather than analysing the deeper structural causes of poverty related health problems.

There’s no real mention of the longer term historical downturn in the North East of the U.K. which highlights the high levels of unemployment, for example.

I’m also not entirely convinced by the (too brief) look at the solutions on offer. Therapeutic interventions in schools was offered up as the solution. Relying on the education sector yet again to sort out this social mess of extreme in equality in life expectancy just isn’t practical.

Having said that, if the mission of the documentary was to alter us to the extent of the problem and shock us, I think it did a reasonable job overall.

Possibly most shocking of all is that men in the poorest boroughs have a life expectancy of just 64: the average man doesn’t even make it to retirement age. And this isn’t the only region in the UK where this happens. In the very poorest regions, men work hard, pay their National Insurance, and get nothing back for it. There’s something not quite right about that!

Ultimately, I agree with the message the documentary puts out, even if it gets somewhat lost in the emotionalism of the three case studies: the reasons people die young are complex, but the most common reason is poverty – low income limits your choices. There is also no reason why anyone should be getting a chronic illness and dying in their 40s. All of the likely soon-to-be deaths in the documentary are entirely preventable!

Relevance to A-level sociology

This documentary offers some us some qualitative insights into the causes, but mainly the consequences of low life expectancy in the poorest regions of the United Kingdom and so should be relevant to the ‘ life expectancy and death rates‘ aspect of the families and households module.

It’s also quite a useful reminder of how we need qualitative data to give us the human story behind the statistics.

If you want to find out more about variations in life expectancy in the UK, you might like this interactive map as a starting point.

Outline two consequences of the ageing population for British society

Consequence 1 – The ageing population may put a strain on public services

Increasing numbers of pensioners puts a strain on the NHS because pensioners use health services more than younger people

Furthermore, with increasing numbers of pensioners ‘sucking money’ out of the welfare state’ there is less left for everything else – services for the young are being cut to compensate

This is because healthy life expectancy is not keeping pace with life-expectancy, and there are increasing numbers of people in their 80s who spend several years with chronic physical conditions such as arthritis, and also dementia both of which require intensive social care.

While the ageing population presents problems, there are solutions – such as improving education about how to stay healthy in later life, changing ideas about working so that people are able to work for longer could be part of the solution.

Consequence 2 – The ageing population puts more of a burden on the younger generation

An ageing population means the dependency ratio has increased – there are fewer working aged people around to support pensioners. The next two generations are bearing a disproportionate cost of the current ageing population.

People in their 50s have become a ‘sandwich generation’ – they are now caught between having to provide care for their elderly parents, while still having their 20 something children living at home.

However, things are even worse for today’s teenagers – the retirement aged has now been pushed back to 68 – young people today are going to have to retire much later than their current grandparents.

Demography – Families and Households Topic Overview

Topic 7: Demography

Demography refers to the study of the causes and consequences of changes to the size and structure of a society’s population. There are generally three things which can change the size and structure of a population – birth rates, death rates and migration, and these three things make up the three major sub-topics.

As with marriage and divorce, we break this down into discussing the reasons for the changes and then consider the consequences. A final additional topic here is migration patterns, which we deal with separately.

Subtopics

7.1: Reasons for changes to the Birth Rate

7.2: Reasons for changes to the Death Rate

7.3: The consequences of an Ageing Population

7.4: The reasons for and consequences of changes to patterns of Migration

Key concepts, research studies and case studies you should be able to apply

Birth rate
Death rate
Dependency Ratio
Total fertility rate
Infant Mortality Rate
Child Mortality Rate
Life Expectancy
Healthy Life Expectancy
Demographic Transition
Immigration
Emigration
Net Migration
Push Factors
Pull Factors

Possible exam style short answer questions

Suggest two reasons for the long term decline in birth rate (4)
Suggest changes in the role of women that may explain why they have fewer children (4)
Suggest three consequences of the decline in the birth rate (6)
Suggest three reasons for the long term decrease in the death rate (6)
Suggest three problems society may face as a result of an ageing population (6)
Suggest three ways in which the elderly might be represented in stereotypical ways (6)
Suggest three ways in which society might respond to the challenges of an ageing population (6)
Suggest three pull factors which might attract people to immigrate into a particular country (6)
Suggest two push factors which might explain patterns of migration (4)
Identify two changes in the patterns of child-bearing over the last thirty years (4)

Possible Essay Questions – You should plan these

Examine the reasons for, and the effects of, changes in family size over the past 100 years or so (24) (January 2012)
Using material from item B and elsewhere assess the view that an ageing Population creates problems for society (24) (June 2014)

The Consequences of an Ageing Population

healthy life expectancy isn’t keeping pace, and the sheer cost of looking after the elderly in the context of family-individualism make the ageing population a problem!

Populations across Europe are getting older which can create social problems related to higher levels of poor health among older people and a greater financial and caring ‘burden’ on younger generations.

But careful social planning can help to overcome these challenges.

What are the consequences of an ageing population?

This is a summary of a recent Radio 4 Analysis podcast – Three Score Years and Twenty on Ageing Britain. It’s of clear relevance to the demography topic within the 7191 families and households module….

Here are some of the main points.

In 1850,half the population in England were dead before they reached 46. Now half the population in England are alive at 85; and 8 million people currently alive in the UK will make it to 100 years or more. And if we extrapolate that to Europe, we can say 127 million Europeans are going to live to 100.

Hans Rosling points out that: We reached the turning point five years ago when the number of children stopped growing in the world. We have 2 billion children. They will not increase. The increase of the world population from now on will be a fill up of adults.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt: The two biggest issues that we face as an ageing society are the sustainability of the NHS and the sustainability of the pension system; and within the NHS, I include the social care system as part of that.

The basic problem we have in Northern European countries is the generational tension between individualism and communal responsibility – Across the generations within a typical family we have become more individualistic and less collective/ communal:

People in their 80s (who grew up in the 1960s) are generally very individualistic – they have retired into property wealth and are unwilling to relinquish the independence this gives them. They have also socialised their children into being more independent: most people today in their 50s (the children of those who are in their 80s) have bought into this – The family norm is one of the typical 50 year old living an independent life with family, miles away from their own parents.

Grandparents today of course help out with childcare occasionally and pay regular visits, but they are generally not taking a day to day role in childcare, and finances are kept separate. This arrangement is mutual – People in their 80s don’t want to be burdens on their children, they want them to have the freedom to live their own lives – to be able to work and raise their children without having to care for them in their old age. (So I suppose you might call the 2000s the era of the individualised family).

(This is very different to what it used to be like in the UK, and what it is still like in many other parts of the world where grandparents live close by and are an integral part of family life, taking an active role in raising their grandchildren on a day to day basis. Various interviewees from less developed countries testify to this, and to the advantages of it.)

Within this context of increasing ‘familial-individualism‘ a number of problems of the ageing population are discussed:

Increased family individualism

One of the main problems which this increasing ‘familial-individualism’ creates for people in their 80s is one of increasing isolation and loneliness as their friends and neighbours move away or die.

One proposed solution is for older people to be prepared to move into communal supported housing where there are shared leisure facilities, like many people do in Florida. However, people are quite set in their ways in the UK and so this is unlikely. A second solution, which some immigrants are choosing is to return to thier country of origin where there are more collectivist values, trading in a relatively wealthy life in the UK for less money and more community abroad.

Healthy Life Expectancy

A second problem is that healthy life expectancy is not keeping pace with life-expectancy, and there are increasing numbers of people in their 80s who spend several years with chronic physical conditions such as arthritis, and also dementia – which require intensive social care.

As with the first point above, this is more of a social problem when children do not see it as their duty to care for their elderly parents – It is extremely expensive to provide round the clock care for chronic conditions for several years, and this puts a strain on the NHS. Basically, the welfare state cannot cope with both pensions and chronic care.

One potential solution to the above is mentioned by Sally Greengross: the Germans in some cases now export older people to Eastern European countries because they can’t afford – or they say they can’t – to provide all the services they need in Germany itself. Could this be the future of chronic elderly care in the UK – Exporting dementia patients to poorer countries?

However, the idea of care-homes themselves are not dismissed when it comes to end of life care – the consensus seems to be that the quality of care in UK elderly care homes is generally very good, and better than your typically family could provide (despite all the not so useful scare programmes in the media).

No money left for the young

A third problem is for those in their 50s – with their parents still alive and ‘sucking money out of the welfare state’ there is less left for everything else – and this has been passed down to the youngest generation.

As a result people in their 50s now face the prospect of their own children living at home for much longer and having to help them with tuition fees and mortgage financing, meaning that their own plans for retirement in their late-50s/ early 60s are looking less likely – In other words, the next two generations are bearing a disproportionate cost of the current ageing population.

Worryingly, there is relatively little being done about this in government circles – Yes, the state pension age has been raised, and measures have been taken to get people to bolster their own private pensions, but this might be too little to late, and it looks like little else is likely to be done – The issue of the ageing population and the cost of welfare for the elderly is not a vote-winner after all.

The programme concludes by pointing out that pensions and care homes are only part of the debate. What will also be needed to tackle the problems of the ageing population is a more age-integrated society, a possible renegotiation at the level of the family so that grandparents are more integrated on a day to day basis in family life (trading of child care for a level of elderly care) and also social level changes – to make work places and public places more accessible for the elderly who might be less physically able than those younger than them.

Here’s the full transcript of the show –analysis-ageing

Other Summaries of Thinking Allowed Podcasts

Thinking Allowed really is an excellent resource for A level Sociology – here are two other summaries of recent Thinking Allowed Podcasts…

Why do White Working Class Kids Lack Aspiration?

Sociological Research on Gangs

Why is the birth rate dropping?

How do patterns vary globally?

Why are people worried?

Can birth rates be boosted?

Extreme right-wing policies boost birth rates

Do family friendly policies help?

Other solutions to sort out the dependency ratio

Signposting

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Analysis

Relevance to A-level sociology

Sources

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Declining healthy life expectancy

How do we explain the stalling of life expectancy?

Relevance to A-level sociology

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Why does America have such a high mid-life mortality rate?

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So how do we tackle low life expectancy?

Final critical appraisal of the documentary

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What are the consequences of an ageing population?

Increased family individualism

Healthy Life Expectancy

No money left for the young

Further Reading

Related Posts

Other Summaries of Thinking Allowed Podcasts

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