A major factor driving down births in South Korea is highly resource intensive parenting. A contextual factor that there wasn't the space to discuss in the Works in Progress article is how South Korean job market motivates this type of parenting, which is very demanding and unpleasant for both parents and children.

There is a tremendous productivity gap between South Korea’s larger and smaller companies – in 2010, it was found that small companies of 10 to 49 employees were just 22% as productive as those with over 200 employees. The productivity gap translates into a significant earnings gap of 50% or more between those employed at smaller and larger companies. Large companies, known as chaebol (think Hyundai and Samsung) are also more likely to provide a better environment for parents, including longer maternity leave. Most young South Koreans aspire to work for a chaebol.

South Korea’s labour market is not only extremely competitive but starkly divided between those who are employed in ‘regular’ versus ‘non-regular’ work, a phenomenon that the OECD describes as ‘labour market dualism’.

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Non-regular workers include those: working part-time; in gig economy-style work; and temporarily employed on fixed-term contracts. Non-regular jobs are significantly more precarious than regular jobs, pay less well, and are less likely to provide workers with social insurance coverage. 27.3% of all those employed in South Korea are temporarily employed, the second highest share of temporary work in the OECD. As of 2021, 45% of employed South Korean women aged 15-29 and 39% of men aged 15-29 were employed in non-regular work. The lower pay associated with non-regular jobs might also explain the increase in the number of young South Koreans who have at least one extra job in addition to working full-time. The number of South Koreans aged 15-29 working at least one additional job increased by 30.9% between 2023 and 2024.

In a labour market with so many poorly paid and insecure jobs, and a very narrow stratum of significantly better paid and more secure ones, it is highly rational for South Korean parents to hothouse their children to the extent that they do.

I first learnt about these dynamics in this useful article on the Substack Chasing Sheep, which makes the interesting case that South Korea’s failure to embrace a market economy is a contributor to its low fertility. I strongly recommend you check it out if you want to know more.

Phoebe

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The Faroes are prosperous, with family-friendly employers and high levels of family stability. But counterintuitively, the Faroes’ high female emigration rate and the selection pressures it exerts may be also playing a role in boosting their fertility.

About the Faroe Islands

Although ultimately part of Denmark, the Faroes are to a large extent self-governing, even making their own trade agreements. Unlike Denmark, they are not part of the EU.

The population is just under 55,000 and is wealthy, with a GDP per capita that beats that of Sweden and Finland (not to mention the UK). The unemployment rate is very low at 1%. There is a small gender employment gap between men and women, 86.7% versus 83.2%, though very importantly, these figures include both part and full-time work (more than 50% of Faroese women work part-time). The Faroe Islands’ Gini Coefficient – a measure of income and wealth inequality, wherein 0 is perfect equality – is 22.6 in comparison with the UK’s 35.

Family breakdown is less common on the Faroes than in many other European countries. As of July 2025, out of 6,546 households with dependent children, 644 had only one adult, indicating that around 9.8% of households with dependent children are single-parent ones. In the UK, the share of households with a single parent is around 25%. The Faroe Islands’ divorce rate was 0.6 per 1000 people in 2024. It was 8.5 per 1000 people in England and Wales in 2023.

Family-friendly policies are in evidence across the islands. Childcare is very heavily subsidised. A nursery place for a child aged under two currently costs parents less than £15 a month for a three year old. For the first 14 weeks of maternity leave, an employee is generally paid her full salary by her employer. The following 44 weeks of leave may be divided between mother and father, and compensated to a maximum of around £3,500 a month by Barsilsskipanin, a state-run insurance scheme that exists to pay out parental benefits and aims to “to make it financially possible for children and parents to be together during the first period of the child's life"“.

Other commentators have emphasised the islands’ family-friendly culture and traditional family values in seeking to explain their exceptional fertility, but a key to part of the puzzle may lie in understanding why it is that so many Faroese women leave the islands and do not return.

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Missing women and mail-order brides

The Faroe Islands are one of the most gender imbalanced places in Europe. As of this year, 52.1% of the population is male and 47.9% is female. This is a worse sex ratio than China’s. As can be seen in the chart below, this is a long running problem for the Faroes.

The driver of this gender imbalance is emigration. Both young men and women leave the Islands for work, study, and for a different type of life, mainly for Denmark. But more women leave than men.

In 2024, a net sum of 275 women aged 15-29 emigrated from the islands. In the same year, a net figure 329 men of the same age group joined the population. This is probably in large part to do with the type of work available on the Faroes, with many people employed in male-dominated sectors including agriculture, fishing and manufacture.

For over a decade, some Faroese men have responded to the situation by seeking brides from other parts of the world, particularly from Thailand and the Philippines. One Thai woman, interviewed in 2017, told the BBC that she found adjusting to the long Faroese winter very difficult: "People told me to go outside because the sun was shining but I just said: 'No! Leave me alone, I'm very cold.'" Despite such difficulties and other culture shocks, as of July 2025, there are 801 women born in Asia resident on the Faroe Islands, many of whom report very much enjoying life on the islands.

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Selection effects

The Faroes are surely reaping the benefits of their family-friendly culture and policies. Childcare is very affordable. Employers are accommodating of the needs of parents. Parents are likely to stay together, making it more likely that more children will be born. Certainly these are factors that make it easier to become and be a parent.

Also at play in the Faroes, tangled up as both a cause and an effect of its family-friendly policies, will be the effects of living in a community with lots of young families. The more people you know who have children, particularly peers, friends and siblings, the more likely you are to have a child yourself. The more familiar you are with young families, the more accommodating you will be of parents that you employ or who are your colleagues.

But there are very likely also selection effects acting to increase Faroese fertility. Faroese women who are keen to pursue a career will find that they can best do so off the islands. Many of these women choose to emigrate. That means that those women who choose to remain may be less career oriented and more interested in starting families and having more children. Added to this is the fact that many of the women who immigrate to the Faroes come expressly to partner and start families.

Conclusion

The Faroese fertility story may be about who chooses to stay as well as culture and policy. The islands retain, and to some extent attract, women who are more inclined to start families. That helps to create a feedback loop keeping fertility high, despite many women of childbearing age emigrating away.

This map shows restaurants and cafés across South Korea that users have identified as officially designating themselves either as a ‘No-Kids Zone’ or as child-friendly in 2023. The 451 blue pins represent places where children are banned, and the 62 green pins are places where children are welcomed. Below you can see the cluster of blue pins in and around Seoul.

It’s difficult to know exactly how many South Korean establishments are child-free, but for cafés it was estimated at 5-10% in 2022, and has probably increased since then.

One area particularly dense in No-Kids Zones is Jeju Island, famed for its natural beauty, which has around 150 businesses that have banned children. A survey of Jeju’s No-Kids Zones reported that business owners had implemented the rule for reasons including a quiet atmosphere, problems with badly behaved children, and concern about legal liability in the event of a child accidentally getting hurt.

The below screenshot, from the Instagram account of a café serving what looks to be a variety of cheesecakes, is a typical example. It carefully specifies that no children below the age of 12 are allowed.

There is debate and disagreement over No-Kids Zones. In July, a Korean language post on X called out the above café in particular, and was retweeted well over 2,000 times. And the below post gives an insight into the tensions that surround No-Kids Zones:

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When children stop counting

South Korea, the lowest birth rate country in the world, is facing depopulation. The government is spending significant sums of money on child subsidies in an attempt to make it easier for citizens to become parents.

But in South Korea, as the above chart shows, children are a very small constituency. The share of the population that is aged under 14 is declining, and the share of those in middle age is increasing. Many of the people in that age group do not have children, aren’t sure if they want them, and may like the idea of eating cheesecake without any wailing toddlers nearby. For all the criticism that some businesses get online, 61.9% of South Koreans said they support No-Kids Zones in 2023.

No-Kids Zones should be understood as an outcome of South Korea’s ultra-low birth rates. They are a clear signal of the fact that the preferences of parents and children matter less as there are fewer and fewer of them, even as South Korean policymakers strain to make it easier to have children.

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The consequences of No-Kids Zones

No-Kids Zones are probably now a minor contributing factor to South Korea’s low birth rates in two ways.

First, they mean that South Koreans are less likely to see young families in their daily lives. That risks making the prospect of having a family of one’s own feel remote. As we covered in The Baby Meme, there is a social aspect to fertility. By seeing other people’s children and understanding how parenthood fits into their lives, we are inspired to think about whether it might fit into ours.

Second, No Kids-Zones raise the cost of parenthood. A young South Korean man or woman is aware that there are many restaurants and cafés, perhaps places they currently enjoy, that they will rarely be able to go to for many years if they do indeed become parents.

Conclusion

To say that No-Kids Zones show that parents are being pushed to South Korea’s social periphery would be a significant over-exaggeration of the situation, and yet might be prescient. Certainly, No-Kids Zones are a manifestation of how ultra-low fertility is re-shaping South Korean urban life and norms. With fewer and fewer children, catering to the needs of younger families becomes less important, trumped by adult comfort. Another part of the challenge that faces South Korean policymakers.

You can watch it on X here (which won’t work for everyone because of new age verification rules), or on YouTube below.

Neil now leads on policy development for the Conservatives and of all the UK’s elected politicians, understands best the seriousness of the birth rate challenge and the need for government intervention to make it easier to have children, for everyone.

Do share our video if you like it!

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This is an effect we intuitively understand. A photo of your co-worker’s sweet baby might make you wonder if you might like one of your own. Spending time with a sibling who isn’t enjoying being a mum or dad might make you less likely to want to be a parent yourself. It isn’t just people you know in real life who can influence your fertility; cultural outputs like TV and books matter too.

In this way, being a parent can be socially and culturally transmitted: a ‘meme’ in the sense that Richard Dawkins originally used the term. That fertility, like many other elements of human life, is socially or memetically influenced has tremendous consequences for policies that want to make it easier to have children. And also for understanding why it can be so difficult for a country with low birth rates to increase them.

Friends and family

Simply put, the more people you know who have children, particularly peers, friends and siblings, the more likely you are to have a child yourself. Interestingly, the effect is at its strongest if the friend or family member’s child is aged under 3, and potentially negligible after that. The effect works the other way too: the fewer peers you know with children, the less likely you are to become a parent.

Even someone we might be much less close to, like a co-worker, can influence the decisions we make around parenthood. A 2024 study looked at data from 11 million Italians to investigate the peer effects of people’s fertility decisions on their colleagues. They found that a 1 percentage-point decrease in average co-worker fertility led to a reduction in the individual probability of having a child of 0.3 to 0.4 percentage points.

TV and fertility

It isn’t just those we know personally who might influence our fertility decisions – perfect strangers and fictional people matter too.

MTV’s 16 and Pregnant was a reality TV show that aired from 2009 to 2014. Described by one NYT writer as “showcasing the grim, hard work of single mothering”, each episode followed a pregnant teen from a few months into her pregnancy until her child was a few months old.

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy attributed a decrease in teenage pregnancy in 2009 directly to the airing of 16 and Pregnant. And in 2014, a widely cited paper co-authored by Melissa Kearney found that the show had indeed led to a 4.3% reduction in teen births between 2009 and 2010 (it’s worth noting that teenage pregnancy in the US was in general decline already).

Another example comes from Brazil. Telenovelas, a type of TV soap opera, often feature small families. This is in part because it makes the plot more manageable for showrunners and writers.

A 2012 paper identified a clear ‘telenovela effect’ on fertility: the more Brazilian women were exposed to telenovelas, the fewer children they had. A subsequent Atlantic article hailed telenovelas for encouraging smaller families and stopping a “population boom in the developing world [that] threatens to devour the world's resources”. Other studies have also found a link between exposure to TV and reduced fertility, including in India, Pakistan and South Korea.

These studies indicate that western TV shows and films, in depicting small families, are helping to instil a smaller family habit in the non-Western world and contributing to declining birth rates in those countries.

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A self-perpetuating culture of parenthood

If you are not a parent, it can be hard to imagine what having a baby might be like, or how you might manage new expenses like nappies and daycare. In countries where fertility has fallen very low, young people are less likely to see or interact with families with children. Living in a society like this helps to create a self-perpetuating culture of lower fertility.

An example of one such society is South Korea. South Korea’s slide into ultra-low fertility was initiated by a wide-ranging and long-lasting antinatal policy programme introduced in the 1960s. Though that programme ended in the 1990s, the small family norm created by this top-down policy has been re-signalled between citizens again and again and again, creating a norm that today actively works against the South Korean government’s efforts to increase the birth rate. Only 28 percent of unmarried South Koreans aged 19-49 say they want children. By comparison, 51 percent of childless Americans aged 18 to 34 do.

But peer effects can also work to strengthen the effects of pro-child policies. As Boom has covered, the employees of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) are responsible for 1.8% of all babies born in Taiwan, even though they make up only 0.3% of Taiwan’s population. In 2023, one in every fifty Taiwanese babies born was a TSMC baby.

This could be not only because TSMC staff have well-paid jobs and work in a company with parent-friendly policies that actively make having a child easier, but also because these policies have created a pocket of pro-parenthood culture in ultra-low fertility Taiwan.

TSMC workers are surrounded by peers who demonstrate that having children is achievable – this has the effect of encouraging parenthood and creating a self-perpetuating culture of higher fertility. A similar effect is also likely at work in South Tyrol, Italy’s highest fertility region.

Even in China, where the extremely oppressive one-child policy enforced a low fertility norm for decades, there is evidence for positive peer effects that mean women are more likely to have children when peers in their community do.

How policy and culture cooperate

There is a temptation when discussing pro-child policies to talk about ‘culture’ as existing in a separate sphere that policy cannot touch. But the socially influenced nature of fertility means that culture can organically work to strengthen the effects of pro-child policies.

By successfully making it easier for one person to start their family, policymakers sparks off a chain reaction of other pro-parent effects. That person makes it easier for others to become a parent simply by being one themselves. In this way, pro-parent policies ripple across society, reaching more and more people.

Conclusion

The insight that the decisions we make around parenthood are socially influenced is important in understanding the factors at play in both lower and higher fertility countries and regions.

It’s also vital in thinking about policy and culture as cooperative partners when we consider how we can make it easier to have children, for everyone.

Finally and importantly, a self-perpetuating culture of parenthood does not mean socially pressuring people who don’t want to be parents to have children. Rather, it means creating communities where those who do want children can see that becoming a parent is a choice they can make.

Phoebe

With thanks to Phoebe Hunt for her research assistance.

I am often asked about reproductive technology, particularly artificial wombs, and what their effect on birth rates might be. Sometimes the questioner is clearly concerned about the prospect of artificial wombs. But often they are excited, suggesting that this technology could solve the birth rate challenge. But social and ethical considerations aside, I am not counting on artificial wombs to close the birth gap and below I explain why.

Replicating human gestation is very hard.

When people discuss artificial wombs, they are often thinking of a device in which a human baby might fully gestate in, all the way from fertilised egg to birth. But creating an ‘end-to-end’ artificial womb is tremendously difficult. In part this is because, as was first explained to me by scientist and author Ruxandra Teslo, human pregnancy has several characteristics that make it extremely challenging to replicate.

The most commonly cited of these comes with a host of challenges for end-to-end artificial wombs: our highly ‘invasive’ placentas, which grow deeply into the wall of womb. This is unique to human and other hominid pregnancies and means the placenta comes directly into contact with the mother’s blood. Because the placenta is made from the baby’s DNA, not the mother’s, there is a complex immune system response that prevents the mother’s body from attacking the placenta. If this fails and the mother’s immune system begins to reject the placenta, this can lead to pre-eclampsia, a very serious pregnancy complication dangerous to mother and child.

There is also a great deal we do not yet understand about human pregnancy, including what actually triggers childbirth to begin (the main theory is that baby secretes a hormone that kickstarts labour). Other things we don’t know include: the cause of pre-eclampsia; why human pregnancies vary in length to the extent that they do (up to five weeks); why morning sickness happens; and why it is that some women report pregnancy temporarily improving chronic health conditions like asthma and even multiple sclerosis.

The artificial wombs that are now nearing human trials are not attempting to replicate the complex chemical processes of pregnancy and host a baby from fertilised egg to birth. Instead, artificial wombs like the EXTrauterine Environment for Neonatal Development (EXTEND) aim to provide a safe place for premature babies to continue growing and preparing for the outside world.

In 2017, EXTEND successfully kept eight premature lambs alive for four weeks, during which time the lambs continued to develop. Currently, babies born before 24 weeks have a less than 50% chance of survival and artificial wombs that can help save the lives of these babies are urgently needed.

As it stands now, human pregnancy is something of a black box and regulatory barriers make it hard for research to change that. One such research barrier is the ‘14 day rule’, a guideline adopted in many jurisdictions, including the UK, India, the US, Canada and Japan. The rule means embryos can only be cultured for research for 14 days. We may in the coming years see this restriction loosen – UK regulator the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has recently recommended that this period be doubled to 28 days – but we cannot be certain that this will be the case.

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Conclusion

Though a world in which end-to-end artificial wombs exist and are perhaps even routinely used by ordinary people may lie in our future, we are not on the brink of developing this technology.

But the birth rate challenge is happening today. People are having fewer children than they want right now and we are experiencing all the negative social and economic effects of that. As scientists continue their vital work of developing artificial wombs that can save the lives of premature babies, the focus for policymakers should be on alleviating barriers to research where there is a strong ethical case for doing so, and on improving the access of ordinary people to conventional reproductive technology like IVF.

Phoebe

Further reading

• See this fascinating Guardian article to learn about how doctors attempt to save the lives of the most premature babies today, with significant global variation in the medical protocols that have developed.

• In an article for Works in Progress, Aria Babu makes the ethical case for artificial wombs and explains some of the barriers to developing them.

• For Asterisk Magazine, Sarah Constantin explains the challenges that researchers attempting to develop artificial wombs are yet to overcome.

• Ruxandra has an interesting piece in Works in Progress on emerging fertility technologies and what they might mean for how women live their lives.

The extent of the child penalty varies hugely among high-income countries. In highly progressive Norway it is only 3% and in Sweden 9%. In the US and France it is 25%. In South Korea it is 49%.

As shown in the chart below, there is a negative correlation between Total Fertility Rate in high-income countries (defined by the World Bank as countries with a Gross National Income of $13,846 or more) and the child penalty.

Correlational data of this kind should not be used to draw definitive conclusions (the correlation is only -0.43 and the R² is 0.1905). But it does indicate that as the career penalties of having children increase, women in high-income countries may become less likely to have children. Consider the case of South Korean women.

South Korea: where motherhood means quitting

South Korean women are extremely highly educated, perhaps the best educated female workforce in the world. 76% of South Korean women aged 25-34 have a tertiary qualification (the average for women of this age group across the OECD is 52%).  In spite of that, South Korea has the largest gender pay gap in the OECD and as of 2023, a female labor market participation rate that is 17.5 percentage points lower than the male: 73.3% versus 55.8%.

This gap is the result of the impact of motherhood on South Korean women’s careers: there is almost no employment gap between men and unmarried women with no children. South Korea’s maternal employment rate is only 56.2%, significantly below the OECD average of 71.4%.

The high level of conflict between career and parenthood that South Korean women face is driven by characteristics of its culture and labour market. This includes: the expectation that women give up work after having a child; extreme working hours; and workplace discrimination against married and pregnant women. Over 50% of married South Korean women quit their job around the birth of their first child.

The cash grants that the South Korean government is now handing out to couples in hopes of improving the country’s ultra-low fertility rate lose their shine in light of the knowledge that a South Korean woman may never again be able to earn what she did before becoming a mother, and that she is not unlikely to lose her job altogether.

Conclusion

Boom has previously highlighted that in European countries, traditional family values are negatively correlated with birth rates and child penalties may be one reason why. Severe child penalties put the choice to work and the choice to have children at odds. Where there is a high opportunity cost of having children – whether in lost wages or high childcare and housing costs – many women will delay having children and some will never do so.

Helping everyone to have the children that they want to have, when they want to have them, must mean making work and parenthood as compatible as we can.

Phoebe

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The Social Market Foundation – a cross-party think tank - and Boom have today co-published a new essay collection featuring prominent voices on the left and centre-left challenging the idea that concerns about falling birthrates are the preserve of conservatives. Contributors include: Anna Rotkirch, Demographic Rapporteur to the Finnish Government and leader of Finland’s Population Taskforce; David Lawrence of UK Day One; and Shreya Nanda of Labour YIMBY and advisor to the Women’s Budget Group.

Below is Anna’s essay on the report she was commissioned to produce for the Finish Government and their strategy to help more Finns have the children they want. You may know Anna from her viral interview with the FT last year on declining fertility in the Nordics. Click here for the full essay collection!

Phoebe

Finland: helping the world's happiest people have families

Anna Rotkirch

With a total fertility rate of 1.25, Finland is infamous for leading the Nordic baby bust, with people in Denmark, Norway and Sweden all also having fewer children. As demographic rapporteur to both the previous and current Finnish governments, I have shaped and seen unfold Finland’s increasingly vibrant policy debate about how we can best support our fellow citizens to start and expand their families.

Whereas in other countries, population policy can be a fringe and politicised issue, in Finland it is emerging as a cross-party and cross-governmental agenda. In 2020, the Social Democrat Prime Minister Sanna Marin, representing a centre-left coalition government, commissioned me to publish an expert report on population policies, called “recovery of the birth rate and longer life expectancy”. After she lost power, the new government, a centre-right coalition, continued with a population programme. It appointed a working group with representatives from the Prime Minister’s Office, Finance Ministry, Education Ministry, and a range of experts, convened by the Minister of Social Affairs and Health.  

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In 2024, I was commissioned again to explore potential policy responses for the government to consider, this time with an emphasis on fertility policies. There were three crucial principles I wanted to make sure were reflected throughout this second report:

Many steps. First, that there is no single “solution” or “quick fix” to the shifts and trends in the lives and childbearing plans of young Finnish adults that are leading to falling fertility. The drivers of these trends are broad and global, cultural and social, and not due to any specific family policy measures. Yet that does not mean nothing can be done to help Finns have the families they want. 

Childwishes. Second, all policy responses must centre on people’s desire to have children. In Finnish this can be beautifully captured in one word – lapsitoive – which literally means “childwish”. That means making human rights and sexual and reproductive rights the cornerstone also of our fertility policies. This is not about lobbying people to have children, but helping those who want families to have them: the health and wellbeing of children and adults must always come first.

Separate family formation and expansion. Third, we must differentiate between policies that support people to have children at all, and those that encourage people to have second, third or subsequent children. Although fertility decline is driven by childlessness, too many pronatalist policymakers seem to think all they need to do is support families who already have children.

Finland already has policies in place to support parents with children, but our birth rates have plummeted. They would have fallen further and faster without those policies in place, but now we need to respond with measures to help people to start their families. This is why both the analysis and the recommendations in my report are split into two parts: those addressing the situation of childless young adults, and those addressing the situation of families with small children.

With these three points in mind, I outlined 20 specific proposals, ranging from the low-cost and uncontroversial to the expensive and societally transformative: let each political party have their pick. The policies can be sorted into five buckets:

• A national conversation. Our first two proposals call on the government to consult with young people to better understand the obstacles they face to having children, and to lead on a broad social discussion about the causes and consequences of Finnish fertility decline. 

• Helping Finns to become parents, earlier. Three proposals focus on the timing of when Finns start families. This includes ending pregnancy discrimination so that working women feel less pressured to delay motherhood, and extra financial support for women who have a first child before the age of 30, perhaps through the tax system or student loan reductions. 

• Fertility awareness and education. Five policy suggestions are concerned with improving fertility awareness, education and counselling. This means improving fertility education in schools and the healthcare guidance available, but also more investment in services that can help people to have children, like IVF. 

• The wellbeing of young adults. Two proposals highlight the need to better support young adults, including in terms of mental health but also in their relationship with the online world, including developing screentime guidelines and helping young adults to develop better interpersonal skills. 

• Parents with young children. The final seven proposals focus on supporting young families, from creating family-friendly workplaces and improving services surrounding pregnancy and birth, to developing a system to compensate parents for the work of caring for their young children so that having and raising a child does not reduce income or pension savings.

All the above proposals flow from some deficit or change that has been identified by scholars as involved in the delaying of parenthood and the decline in fertility. Yet we must stress that there is little if any robust evidence for how well these different proposals would work in the specific circumstances of Finland today – that is another reason that a holistic, multi-lever policy response is necessary. 

To my delight, the report did ignite real debate in Finland. Our record-low birth rate was arguably the dominant social topic of autumn 2024, triggering commentary and critique, lamentation and amusement. A host of new proposals or improvements to those suggested in the report have also been presented. In other words, a rational and promising response to major social change.

The Nordic nations remain global leaders in generous family policies, in individual well-being, and in gender equality. Finland is, of course, known as the happiest country on earth. Provided political and societal awareness, we have all the ingredients to solve the current baby bust in an empowering, life-affirming way.

The Office for National Statistics’ recently-published national population projections expect continued population growth for the United Kingdom at a relatively strong pace until 2047. This forecast might come as something of a surprise given the constant drumbeat of news about falling fertility rates in the UK and abroad. As this brief review of British population dynamics will suggest, the ONS’ forecast includes several unfounded assumptions which lead to considerable excess optimism about the future of British population growth.

Projection vs. Forecasting: a distinction without difference

Before addressing the data the ONS provides, it should be noted that the ONS adopts an unreasonable distinction: that “projections” are different from “forecasts.” The ONS places a warning on their published document saying, “National population projections are not forecasts and do not attempt to predict potential changes in international migration. Migration assumptions do not directly account for recent and future policy or economic changes. Demographic assumptions for future fertility, mortality and migration are based on observed demographic trends.” This disclaimer is strange, since “projection” is simply, etymologically, derived from the Latin “to launch forward,” while “forecast” is simply, etymologically, derived from the Old High German “to launch forward.” They are literally synonyms, and in fact identically derived, it’s just that Alfred the Great made forecasts, while William the Conqueror made projections.

The ONS insists on this kind of logomachy in order to avoid serious scrutiny. “Projections” presumably based simply on walking past trends forward sound safe. If they are wrong, nobody can be blamed: it’s only a model. “Forecasts” however might be wrong, they are statements about what will be. Outside observers might track and check the accuracy of forecasts. In reality, of course, the ONS is perfectly aware that virtually every single reader of their reports will immediately interpret their “it’s only a model” as an actual prediction of the future, because that is, in fact, what it is. Because this is the inevitable and nearly exclusive popular interpretation of their data, they owe it to the public not to hem and haw about “projections,” but in fact to produce a credible and defensible forecast, or prediction.

The projections produced are, unfortunately, not credible or defensible. Below, I will lay out reasons to believe that not only are the projected immigration values dubious, but the projections for fertility and mortality are perhaps even more so. We’ll start with immigration.

Immigration

The ONS does anticipate that deaths will outnumber births in the very near future. How, then, does population growth continue apace? The answer is international migration. The ONS anticipates that international migration will decline over the next few years, then remain stable at around a net gain of 350,000 people per year. The ONS says they “do not attempt to predict potential changes in international migration,” but this is not true: they predict international migration will fall quite a bit in the mid-to-late 2020s, but then it will remain at levels greater than those observed any time in the 20th century. The ONS anticipates that net migration into the U.K. will be about the same in 2030-2039 as it was for the entire cumulative period from 1940-2009.

This could be correct, or it might not be, but it seems clear that this is neither a simple forecast of “current rates continue into the future,” nor “future trends return to historic baselines.” Rather, the ONS is assuming that the U.K. will maintain an immigration stance which is more open to immigration than it was at any point in the 20^th Century – but not quite as liberal as it has been in the last few years. This may or may not be true, but the ONS should forthrightly state that their view of population presupposes a specific set of political outcomes, namely, persistent failure of political efforts to reduce migration for many decades to come. If that political forecast implied by these projections does not come to pass, British population growth will come crashing down. Moreover, the 21^st century thus far saw a wave of quite unique events: European Union expansion allowed a dramatic increase in immigration in the 2000s and 2010s, while major refugee crises (especially in the Middle East and Ukraine) drove huge increases in the 2010s and 2020s. If the ONS expects the U.K. to rejoin the E.U. or expects that the unusual pace of civil and interstate conflict observed 2010-2025 will continue through the 2040s, they should say so, and perhaps defense budgets will need adjusting too.

Mortality

Life expectancy is stagnant in the UK. According to the ONS’ data release, in 2012, English baby boys had a life expectancy of 79.3 years. In 2023, English baby boys still had a life expectancy of 79.3 years. This pattern of stagnation was also generally true for baby girls, and in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

And yet, rather than recognize this stagnation and take seriously the possibility that the health of British people may not inexorably improve as it did during the 20^th Century, the ONS insists on assuming that “long run rates of mortality improvement” will continue. These long-run rates assume that gains to health in the next 20 years will be better predicted by the gains made in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, than the stagnation experienced over the last decade.

This is not a credible forecast. Every single ONS projection since 2012 has forecast rising life expectancy, and every single forecast since 2012 has had to start that forecast rise at a lower point, because the rise in lifespans continues to not happen. The ONS would be better off just assuming that life expectancy is going to remain stable where it is, that British lifestyles and the British healthcare system are not going to improve considerably in the near future. To their credit, the ONS has reduced the rosiness of their projections: while in 2012 they expected annual life expectancy gains of 0.18 years between 2012 and 2047, in these latest figures they expect just annual life expectancy gains of just 0.12 years between 2022 and 2047. Nonetheless, that is still far greater than recent experience suggests may be credible.

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Fertility

But perhaps the strangest error the ONS makes is on fertility. Since 2010, the ONS has been persistently forecasting that fertility would remain stable. In fact, fertility has fallen dramatically, as the figure below shows.

The 2016-based forecast, for example, anticipated a 2023 total fertility rate of 1.79. The true value was likely nearer 1.41-1.45 based on data reported for 2023 thus far (the statistical agencies in the United Kingdom report birth data at a ponderous speed compared to other countries). That miss of about 0.35 children per woman is enormous: birth rates were 20% lower than expected. The entire COVID pandemic only reduced life expectancy by about 1.2% at its height, and the large forecasting error for mortality I noted above nonetheless amounted to just a 3.3% error. The ONS’ misses on fertility in their previous forecasts have seismic implications for planning in the U.K. Schools planning their entering cohorts of 5 or 6 year olds based on these data would have found fully one-in-five of expected incoming children to be missing.

So, what about the newest fertility forecast? Is it also excessively rosy?

Bizarrely, no. It’s actually too pessimistic – at least in the short term. Northern Ireland and Scotland both publish relatively reliable provisional birth data and, while England and Wales do not, England’s health system publishes monthly data on the number of newborns registered with pediatricians and other doctors, which turns out to be extremely strong predictive of eventual birth reports. As such, although we do not know for sure what birth rates were in the U.K. in 2024, we know that births in Scotland through October were pretty much unchanged vs. 2023 after years of decline, births in Northern Ireland were down just 1.6% (vs. an average annual decline of 2.7% over the prior 5 years), and that infant patient counts in England were up nearly 2% year-on-year in September (vs. an average annual decline of 2% over the prior 5 years). In other words, unless Welsh women went on an extraordinary birth strike in 2024, UK births in 2024 almost certainly rose vs. 2023. And since the pace of that increase actually grew bigger over the course of 2024, it’s reasonable to think 2025’s birth rate may not be as low as expected either.

Using these data to calibrate nearby years, as well as a demographic cohort model comparable to that used by ONS, my consulting firm notified clients this previous December of our expectations for British fertility, shown in the figure above as the “Demographic Intelligence” forecast. Our forecast is almost certainly more accurate than the ONS’, not least since we incorporated 2023 and 2024 provisional data, which the ONS elected not to do. We find that the ONS has probably underestimated fertility for the mid-2020s. The gap is not enormous; the ONS expects fertility rates around 1.41-1.43, whereas we expect them nearer 1.46-1.49. Nonetheless, that’s a 4% difference in the number of children who will be starting school around 2028-2032, and a 4% difference in how much space will be needed in maternity wards. It may sound small, but if pharmaceutical companies use these forecasts to plan production of vaccines (which can be expensive to store in large quantities), it won’t feel small to the parents whose child’s jabs have to be rescheduled because the local clinic ran out.

Furthermore, while the ONS expects a gradual long term increase in fertility, my firm projects a decline. In my view, the fundamental dynamics driving low fertility (namely, poor economic outcomes for young adults and especially young adult men, housing costs at levels which are ruinously unaffordable for young adults, and rapidly falling marriage rates) are not about to disappear. While there may be year-to-year volatility, without a major course correction, there is only one reasonable direction for a projection of British fertility in the long run: down.

It should be noted, however, that course corrections are possible. Migration is obviously highly sensitive to politics, but fertility is too – as the SMF has argued. Pro-family policies in most countries are relatively small: even in unabashedly pronatal Hungary, the reality is that the benefits a family receives for investing time in raising their children are extremely modest compared to the wages they receive from investing time in market work. But even these modest policies are known to be effective: recent academic reviews strongly support the notion that more generous family policies modestly boost births.

The British Government should not allow the ONS projections to lull it into a false sense of security: policies to tackle the root causes of falling fertility and directly support families with childrearing are needed to avert a worsening demographic picture.

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Not everyone’s epidural ends up working in exactly the same way, but I was able to feel my legs and to feel pressure. It meant that I lightly dozed through what are considered to be some of the most painful parts of labour, occasionally having a snack and a cup of tea. I dozed not because the epidural made me sleepy, but because I was so relaxed.

In the minutes right before my daughter was born, I paused to tell my husband that I wasn’t in pain and that the noises I was making were simply from the effort of pushing. He describes this moment as “surreal”. It was surreal for me too – I had expected more pain.

I did experience one unpleasant side effect from the epidural – 20 minutes or so of intense shivering. Epidurals can also make labour last longer, and there’s debate over whether or not having one raises the chance of an unplanned caesarian section.

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Epidurals in the UK

Astonished at just how effective my epidural was, I was surprised to learn that I’m in the minority of mothers by choosing to have one.

Take-up is low

Take-up of epidurals in the UK is low. In 2020, a report found they are used in England for just under a third of births (31%). And a 2024 study looking at Scottish data from 567,216 women who gave birth between 2007 and 2019 found that only 22% of mothers received an epidural. By contrast, 83% of French women receive epidurals.

Poorer women are less likely to have an epidural

Research into the aforementioned Scottish data shows that socio-economic deprivation is associated with lower take-up of epidurals. In fact, Scottish women living in the most deprived areas who have a medical condition that means an epidural is advisable for their safety are still less likely to receive one than women from the most advantaged decile with no such medical condition.

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Increasing take-up of epidurals

It is a fact that not everyone wants an epidural and that very many women have excellent birth experiences without one. However, I suspect that take-up in the UK would be higher if pregnant women received more information about epidurals from their midwife teams.

Though midwives were extremely supportive of my decision to get one, I found information from the hospital about epidurals sparse as my due date approached. In one information session I attended, epidurals were described as “for those who require further pain relief”. I believe that framing like this means that women are more likely to assume that an epidural simply isn’t for them, and perhaps do not realise that it can literally remove the pain of childbirth.

Anecdotally, I’ve also found that many women worry about the risk of paralysis when considering an epidural. But the Royal College of Anaesthetists puts this risk at somewhere between 1 in 54,500 and 1 in 141,500, or between 0.000707% and 0.001834%.

Things that are more dangerous than having an epidural include hip replacement surgery, liposuction, and having your appendix out.

With this in mind, I believe it is important to better communicate two things to women:

1. How effective at removing labour pains epidurals are;

2. How safe they are.

Conclusion

When we think about how we can help more people have the children that they want to have, it’s also important to think about how those children come into the world and how we can make that experience better for parents, especially mothers.

For me, an epidural was part of giving me a good birth experience. And because giving birth – and recovering from it – is going to be physically and emotionally demanding for almost all of us, it is important that women are aware of all the tools available to them. With epidural use at under a third in the UK, I believe we could do a much better job at informing women that this method of pain relief is here for them, if they want it.

Phoebe

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But first, here are five key pieces of information that capture the scale of that challenge and the consequences China is facing:

1. China is an ultra-low fertility country. China’s Total Fertility rate is estimated to be around 1 child per woman.

2. China’s population peaked in 2021 and has declined year on year since then.

3. Over the next 10 years, China is predicted to lose 51 million people from its population. That’s more than the current population of Canada.

4. More than a fifth of China’s population is currently aged over 60. The state retirement age is 60 for men, but is rising to 63 in January 2025. For women, the retirement age will increase from 55 to 58 for those in white collar jobs, and from 50 to 55 for those in blue collar jobs.

5. China’s main state pension fund is forecast to run out of money by 2035. This is primarily due to a decline in the workforce, and this prediction was made in 2019, before the pandemic hit China’s economy.

Even today, with the scale of China’s demographic challenge laid bare, Chinese citizens are not legally free to have as many children as they would like. Instead, when the one-child policy was removed in 2015 after nearly 40 years, it was replaced with a two-child policy. In 2021, that in turn replaced by a three-child policy. As recently as 2020, parents were being fined over $20,000 for having a third child in parts of China.

Important trends that indicate how difficult it might be for China to see its fertility rate increase include increasing youth unemployment and a decline in relationship formation, with a rise in single households. Social scientist Alice Evans has also recently written about viral posts on Chinese social media that are intensely and viscerally negative about becoming a parent, particularly childbirth.

Furthermore, the one-child policy, a cultural preference for sons, and the use of sex-selective abortions (which are illegal in China), have together given China a skewed sex ratio, with 111 baby boys born for every 100 baby girls. The UN Population Fund estimates this means 100,000 female foetuses are being aborted annually.

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What’s the plan?

Importantly, Xi’s article explicitly acknowledges the negative effects of low birth rates and an ageing population, including for economic growth. But he also defends the one-child policy and attempts to frame China’s demographic decline as an opportunity to focus on “high-quality population development”.

Overall, there are three major themes in Xi’s policy plan to meet China’s demographic challenge:

1. Developing the “quality” of the existing population. Investing in people, including improving health and education services.

2. Making China more family friendly. This includes better childcare and maternity leave, as well as building a family-friendly culture and combatting customs like expensive dowries that might discourage marriage.

3. Seizing the “opportunities” of population decline and responding to the ageing population. Making sure that older people lead good lives and growing the ‘silver economy’. Adapting new infrastructure to the new population, and taking the chance to protect and restore the natural environment.

The Chinese President’s article comes off the back of a new directive (here in Chinese), released by China’s State Council in October, that also aims to promote a “fertility-friendly society”, with a list of policies including better maternity leave, better medical maternity care, and more housing support for families (an English language report about the directive can be found here). It is not clear when or how these policies will be implemented or when ordinary Chinese people might begin to benefit from them.

Other parts of Xi’s article also reflect what has been trailed by the Chinese state earlier this year, including the encouragement to businesses to grow the ‘silver economy’ and turn the ballooning population of elderly people into an economic asset. Already, goods and services for older people account for 6% of China’s GDP.

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The outlook

In populations where the number of people of reproductive age and the number of people below reproductive age has declined, stopping population decline is extremely difficult because even if those young people rapidly increase their fertility, there are not enough of them to avert decline as the attrition from older age groups continues. This is called negative population momentum.  

In exerting this downward pressure on births and creating smaller younger generations, the legacy of China’s one-child policy has been to create a both smaller target and a more significant challenge for Chinese policymakers who want to see more people in China have children.

Consider that between 1960 and 2023, China saw its population of over 65s increase by 684%, and its population of under 14s decrease by 11%. By contrast, in the US, the population of over 65s increased by 276% and the population of under 14s increased by 7%.

The pro-parent policies that Xi’s article and the State Council’s directive outlines are positive, aimed squarely at making having and raising children in China easier. But if China is serious about mitigating population decline, the speed and extent to which they are actually delivered matters hugely, and the cultural and economic headwinds they pull against are significant.

Phoebe – with thanks to foreign policy expert Sam Hogg, whose Substack can be found here, and whose thoughts were very useful in writing this piece.

We learnt last month that England and Wales’ birth rate has slipped to 1.44. But Scotland is already at 1.28, not far off famously low fertility Japan’s 1.2.

A depopulating country

“Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North, the birth place of Valour, the country of Worth.” – My Heart’s In the Highlands, Robert Burns

Scotland’s population is predicted to peak in 2033. Scotland will then go into population decline, even as the population of the UK as a whole is expected to continue to grow.

Currently, this is most acutely being felt in Scotland’s rural Highlands and Islands regions. These are already depopulating and seeing rapid declines in the number of working age people. Symptoms include staffing shortages in the tourism industry and schools that are emptying of pupils. Even four years ago in 2020, around a quarter of schools in southwest Scotland were at less than 50% capacity, with some taking only 13% of the pupils they could.

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Why is fertility lower in Scotland?

That Scotland lags behind England and Wales in terms of fertility is no fresh development – it’s been this way since the 1970s.

Figure 1. Total Fertility Rate 2000-2022

Why has the UK-wide decline in birth rates unfolded faster and to a greater extent in Scotland? Immigration and a preference for smaller families among Scots are some of the answer.

Immigration

Scotland has fewer immigrants than England and Wales. People born outside the UK make up 10% of Scotland’s population, in comparison to 16.8% of the population of England and Wales.

But not only do fewer foreign-born people live in Scotland than in England and Wales, the countries of origin of those people are different. Of the 397,000 non-British nationals living in Scotland in 2021, 58% were EU nationals. Of the 10 million non-UK born people living in England and Wales in 2021, 36.4% were born in the EU.

In 2020, the five most common non-UK countries of birth for people living in Scotland were:

1. Poland (est. 80,000 people)

2. Germany (est. 27,000 people)

3. Pakistan (est. 26,000 people)

4. India (est. 24,000 people)

5. Ireland (est. 22,000 people)

But in England and Wales, according to the 2021 Census, the five most common non-UK countries of birth were:

1. India (920,300 people)

2. Poland (743,000 people)

3. Pakistan (623,500 people)

4. Romania (538,800 people)

5. Ireland (324,600 people)

We can see that a greater proportion of Scotland’s immigration comes from countries with lower fertility rates. The Total Fertility Rate of Poland is 1.3, but in Pakistan it is 3.6. And in general Scotland receives a greater share of its immigration from EU countries, which are likely to be lower fertility than the non-EU countries of origin that make up more immigration to England and Wales.

This may in part explain why foreign-born women in Scotland actually have significantly fewer children than UK-born women in Scotland, as Figure 2 below shows, when the opposite is the case in England and Wales.

Figure 2. Total Fertility Rates of UK-born and foreign born women in 2021

Scotland’s different immigration mix likely contributes to its lower birth rate. Yet the table above also shows us that even among UK-born women, Scottish women have fewer children than women in England and Wales. Immigration cannot fully explain why Scotland is the UK’s low fertility ‘South Korea’.

Smaller families

A paper published this month finds fascinating differences in family habits and the pattern of birth rate decline between the four nations of the UK. In seeking to understand what’s going on in Scotland, the headline news is that while Scottish women are not more likely than women in England and Wales to be childless, they are more likely to have a smaller family.

As can be seen in Figure 3 below, Scotland has seen a decrease in family size across all women born between 1956 and 1978 (these age cohorts were looked at because it can be assumed that these women have completed their families and will not have more children).

Figure 3. Distribution of completed family size by age 40, by birth cohort, 95% confidence interval

Scotland has also seen an increase in one-child families across all educational groups, as shown in Figure 4 below.

Figure 4. Proportion of 1-child families age 40, by birth cohort and educational attainment, 95% confidence interval

Do Scots simply want fewer children than those in other parts of the UK? There is some evidence of that, as uncovered by Berrington et al. (2023).

Between 1991 and 2009, 77% of Scottish mothers with two or more children said they did not intend to have any more children, in comparison with 75% of those in Wales and 71% in England. But Scottish mothers with one child are not less likely than those living in England to report that will or probably will have another a child, though they are more likely than English women to say they ‘don’t know’.

Berrington et al. found that the decreased likelihood of Scottish mothers with two or more children intending to have another child persisted even controlling for ethnicity, age, education, economic activity, and country of birth. They also found that these differences in fertility intentions increased in the period of 1991-2009, versus 1979-1990, theorising that growing up around smaller families has prompted more Scots to want smaller families themselves.

But Berrington et al. also note that the difference in fertility intentions between Scottish and English and Welsh women are still small, and so cannot fully explain why Scottish women have fewer children. That indicates that there are barriers to parenthood in Scotland that are acting to bring down the birth rate, and which could be alleviated.

What is Scotland doing about this?

“…there is a role for government in addressing the barriers that may prevent individuals and couples from starting a family.” – Scottish Population Strategy 2021

Pleasingly, the answer is not nothing. Scotland published its first national Population Strategy in 2021, explicitly acknowledging the challenge of falling birth rates and naming helping Scottish people start and expand their families as a goal. It would be excellent – though overdue – to see the UK Government take a similar step.

But though the Scottish Population Strategy says it aims to improve birth rates by making Scotland more ‘family friendly’, much of it consists of child and young-people related policies that though positive, are not explicitly targeted at helping more Scots have the children they want. An example is the restating of the commitment to do better by care leavers.

Perhaps the two policies in the Strategy that are most clearly targeted at supporting Scottish people to have the children they want are the Scottish Baby Box (a scheme that sends parents of newborns free essentials and which was not a new policy but introduced in 2017) and the Scottish Child Payment, an extra child benefit payment for low-income families that is primarily intended to alleviate child poverty.

In February 2024, the Scotland published a follow-on to its Population Strategy, a Depopulation Action Plan. This is focused on helping the rapidly depopulating areas of Scotland cope with the draining of their communities and to try to encourage young people to stay. This includes giving one affected council a mere £30,000 grant to research the “causes of local population decline” and “inform the development of future policy interventions”.

Taken together, neither the Population Strategy nor the Depopulation Action Plan can be called a serious effort to arrest Scotland’s population decline, now due to begin in under a decade.

Conclusion

Scotland is becoming an older, emptier place. In part, that’s because of the type and level of immigration it receives, and because of a smaller family habit among Scots. But there is still evidence that Scots have fewer children than they want to have, meaning there is much for the Scottish Government to do.

Very positively, the Scottish Government – an explicitly progressive, left-of-centre administration – does acknowledge that declining birth rates are a problem and a place for government action. Yet the actual policy response so far is certainly insufficient for a country that will start declining in population in under a decade, if not before.

Scotland is a country of extreme natural beauty that has made tremendous contributions to the cultural, economic, scientific and political life of the UK and beyond, through figures like Adam Smith, Andy Murray, Tony Blair, Robert Burns and Gordon Brown. It is a tragic thing to see it on the brink of such decline, with its ability to continue making astonishing contributions to the world diminishing as its population dwindles.

Phoebe

Phoebe

I’m not a ‘kid person’. Even when I was little, I found most of my peers kind of annoying. I was the sort of child that adults would describe as “born 50”, and sure enough I couldn’t wait to get older. Now that I’ve grown up, I’ve found a partner who is similarly ambivalent about children and since we don’t have any strong desire to have them, we’ve gradually resolved that we won’t.

So it might therefore seem paradoxical, hypocritical even, that I support policies to increase the birth rate. If I don’t much like children, why do I want there to be more of them? If I’m not prepared to have children myself, what gives me the right to tell other people to have them?

To be absolutely clear, I don’t think I have any right to tell other people how to make one of the most consequential decisions of their lives. To the contrary, I am extremely grateful to live in a liberal and permissive society that allows us to make such a choice for ourselves, and am glad to face limited social sanction for my life choices. But I do believe that we must make things easier for those that do want to have children to do so. 

“I’m an ally to those who want and have children, even if parenthood isn’t for me.”

First, because I’m liberal enough to recognise that different people want different things for their lives. In recent years, I’ve seen a number of my friends become parents: the meaning and purpose children have brought to their lives is a genuine source of joy to me. I believe it is important for those who want families to be able to have them: this is at the heart of my pronatalism. When it comes to LGBTQ rights, we talk about straight ‘allies’ – I’m an ally to those who want and have children, even if parenthood isn’t for me. 

Second, more selfishly, I am a pronatalist because I recognise the value of children to society. Given the demographic challenges we face, children – as adult members of society who will work and contribute through the tax system  – are a public good. I’m an economist and I know that we all benefit from people having children, if we care about the economy or funding public services. 

I’m willing to acknowledge that there’s a sense in which I’m free riding on the efforts of parents – I know that their toils today make it easier to fund my pension in the future. It’s similar to the way in which I benefit from the armed forces. We’re used to recognising and appreciating the contribution soldiers make to guarantee our national security, while being grateful that we have a volunteer rather than conscript army. The sacrifices of parenthood are clearly not the same – however much of a terror your toddler might be – but the principle is the same. 

Parents, thank you for your service. I’m glad you do it so I don’t have to. But I do want to do my bit to make your lives better, and that’s why I care about policies that make it easier to start a family.

Anonymous

The complicated relationship between income and fertility

Do people inevitably have fewer children as they become wealthier? No, not necessarily.

Demographer Lyman Stone has recently written about how the relationship between income and fertility is not straightforward, but inconsistent both across cultures and across time: sometimes higher incomes are positively correlated with fertility, sometimes negatively.

For example, research published in July that looked at RCTs of interventions such as business training programmes in sub-Saharan Africa, found that women who became wealthier had significantly more children, not fewer.

There isn’t a straightforwardly negative relationship between income and fertility in European countries either, as new research is showing.

New research from the Netherlands

Dutch research published this month not only finds:

1. Dutch people on higher incomes are more likely than those at lower incomes to have children.

2. This positive relationship is strengthening for first births: income is becoming more important for the transition to parenthood, with an intensifying relationship between first births and income observed between 2008 and 2022.

The paper’s author, Dr Daniël van Wijk, found that while Dutch men in the top income quintile were 2.38 times more likely to become a parent than men in the lowest quintile in 2008, by 2022 they were 3.11 times more likely to do so.

The paper identifies a strengthening effect of income on chance of parenthood for women too. In 2008, Dutch women in the top income quintile were 1.63 times more likely to have a first child than women in the lowest quintile, but by 2022 they were 2.44 times more likely to do so.

Van Wijk also published a paper earlier this year looking at the relationship between income and first births – or chance of becoming a parent – in the US, Germany, UK, South Korea, Switzerland, Russia and Australia.

As shown above, van Wijk and his co-author identified that men and women in Australia, Germany, South Korea, the UK and the US are more likely to become parents as their income increases. They also found a positive relationship between income and first birth for Russian men, but not for Russian women, and the results for Swiss men and women were positive but not statistically significant.

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Why is the gap between rich and poor widening?

This intensifying effect of income on chance of parenthood is likely being driven by declining fertility among lower income people. That means it is increasingly the case that earning a lower income makes you less likely to ever become a mum or dad. And the gap between richer and poorer in their ability to start a family is getting wider.

Resource intensive parenting (in terms of time and money) may be contributing to this gap. As our sense of what level of resource is necessary to raise a child increases, parenthood moves out of the reach of more and more people for longer.

Another major contributing factor will be increases in the non-negotiable costs faced by prospective parents – like housing. This means that economic pressures on young people in countries like the UK – including stagnant wages and the housing crisis – are driving postponement of parenthood to later and later ages.

Not only will these cohorts of young people not be able to start a family until later in life than previous generations, but when they are financially ready to do so, they may find that conceiving is difficult, particularly if they want a second or a third child.

Consider the below chart, created by demographer Anna Rotkirch using a 2015 paper. A woman who wants a 90% chance of realising her ideal family size of three children should begin trying to get pregnant with her first child aged 23. For a 90% chance of having two children, she should begin at age 27, and for a 90% chance of having one, at the age of 32.

Closing the ‘parent gap’

The strengthening relationship between income and the transition to parenthood observed in countries like the US and UK should send an important message to policymakers. That message is that by increasing the financial stability of younger people, governments can help these younger cohorts start a family and counteract the trend of the postponement of parenthood to later and later ages.

New policy thinking is also necessary to better establish what government interventions can help young people in their transition to parenthood. It may be the case that policies such as more generous child benefit are particularly useful in helping people to expand their families, to have the second or third child that they want, but less useful in supporting those who are trying to ready themselves for parenthood.

We had a lively and engaged audience – including a 7-month old baby who listened attentively the whole way through – and fascinating remarks from panelists. The recording of the event is here and below is my brief write-up of some of Ruxandra and Aveek’s thoughts:

Ruxandra

“Our culture is the opposite of the grandmother that comes to you and asks, ‘When are you having a kid?’.”

Men, women, and culture. Ruxandra is concerned about lower levels of relationship formation contributing to fewer people being able to have families (Rux has written before about increasing political polarisation between the sexes, especially online, and you can read that piece here). But she also thinks a developing culture of risk aversion and increasing levels of anxiety in society might have knock-on effects on when and if people are ready or able to start families.

And, while Ruxandra doesn’t think we have an anti-child or antinatal culture, she does think that conversations about children or when people might have them are generally absent, that our culture is the “the opposite of the grandmother that comes to you and asks, ‘When are you having a kid?’”.

Valuing children. Tying into her point about culture, Ruxandra pointed out that many of us display a marked divergence between what we say is good and fulfilling and what we ultimately experience as good and fulfilling. She drew on Pew Research that tells us that 71% of Americans identify having an enjoyable job or career as very or extremely important for a fulfilling life, while only 26% say the same of having children. Yet parents themselves do identify their children as the most fulfilling aspect of their own lives.

Ruxandra added that even parents who say their children are the most fulfilling aspect of their lives seem to have a preference for their own children to find fulfilment through career. There’s a disconnect here – the role of career in our lives is being overvalued and children undervalued. 

Reproductive technology. Ruxandra, a professional scientist, told us that research into female reproduction and human fertility is “incredibly understudied” and extremely underfunded. She noted that it’s a challenging area of research because we lack good animal models for human reproduction – for example, menopause is highly unusual in the animal kingdom – but that fundamentally what’s missing is money.

Ruxandra underlined that fertility technology that could help more people have the children they want isn’t about seeing women in their seventies regularly start having children, or about more people having babies with Elon Musk (as came up in one audience member’s question). Instead, it’s about helping the significant minority of women who are going to have a problem conceiving have a child. Currently, we have no way of predicting which women will struggle to conceive in their twenties or thirties.

Different types of women have different reasons for having fewer children. There are women who are materially struggling and having to delay starting a family for financial reasons who government policy could support. And there are women who want to succeed in their careers first and so come to starting a family later, who tech improvements could help - Ruxandra wondered if science can help these women to “choose timelines” that work for them, while also breaking the association between pronatalism and people who want women to stop working so they can have more children.

Aveek

“J.D. Vance is the worst messenger you could have for pronatalism.”

Realistic expectations. Aveek began by criticising the name of the event, Kickstarting the next baby boom. He argued that by talking about baby booms and replacement rate fertility of 2.1 children per woman, people who want to improve birth rates risk fatalism, pessimism, and government inaction by setting their stated goals too high.

Instead, Aveek pointed out that there’s lots of evidence – British, Australian, Austrian and more – that government policy can substantially raise birth rates and argued that the UK could achieve a birth rate that is 0.3 children per woman higher via policy, and reap many benefits as a result. He warned us that it would be a tremendous own goal to ignore policy options that can get us to that extra 0.3, but that couldn’t raise birth rates all the way to 2.1.

The reciprocal relationship between culture and policy. Aveek argued that culture can have a positive, ‘multiplier effect’ on policies introduced by governments to make having children easier, thus strengthening their impact. Policies can make it more likely for a positive culture around parenthood to develop, and that culture then reinforces the effect of the policy.

Aveek also made it clear that for maximum effect, policy solutions aimed at making things easier and better for parents should be accompanied by language that signals to parents that we value what they’re doing, and that we think it’s better for us all if people are able to have the children that they want.

Cross-ideological, cross-party, multi-decade. Aveek believes that helping more people have the children they want to have and improving the UK’s birth rate is a multi-decade, multi-government project, just as it was in France in the last century. That means building cross-party consensus that making it easier for people to have children is something government policy can and should be doing is very important. It also means preventing the issue of declining birth rates from becoming politically polarised is absolutely crucial.

Vance versus Walz. Aveek argued that J.D. Vance, with his thoughtless “childless cat ladies” comments and more, is the worst messenger that the issue of declining birth rates could have, but that his opponent Tim Walz actually has a track record of working to make it easier for people to have and raise the children they want. Aveek pointed out that as Minnesota Governor, Walz’s express goal was to make Minnesota the best place to raise a child (this included implementing America’s most generous child tax credit policy). And just last month, Walz said he wants to help more Americans have the families they want. 

Do check out the YouTube link if you want more of Ruxandra and Aveek’s thoughts. Topics covered in the audience Q&A include:

• Whether current pro-parent policies over-emphasise childcare

• Rigid life paths in career and education and how they affect family formation

• How the housing crisis affects family formation in the UK

• Resource intensive parenting

• Whether we need a non-political pro-child movement

• Whether the policies of the last Conservative Government damaged UK birth rates

Phoebe

Roughly fifteen years ago, there was a publishing micro-trend of self-help books that each centred around the supposed superiority of some facet of French culture. Good examples are the classic French Women Don’t Get Fat (about how much slimmer French women are) and French Children Don’t Throw Food (about how much better French parenting is). Well, here’s something that definitely is different about the French: they have more children.

Today, French women have more children than those in any other European country, with a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 1.68, and a TFR that was at 2 from 2006 to 2014. To put this into perspective, 100 people consisting of 50 men and 50 women who partnered and had children, grandchildren and great grandchildren at the fertility rate of France today would expect to have 59 great grandchildren between them. But if those same 100 people instead had children, grandchildren and great grandchildren at the fertility rate of Spain (1.21 children per woman), they would instead have only 22 great grandchildren between them. 

As outlined by demographer Lyman Stone in his informative 2024 report on southern European fertility, French fertility is even distinctly higher in comparison with the regions directly along its borders. This indicates that higher French fertility is not simply an effect of cultural factors. The French side of the Franco-Spanish border has higher fertility, and so does the French side of the Franco-Italian border. That is despite these being culturally similar regions with historically somewhat liquid borders. 

My favourite example of this is Corsica and Sardinia. Both are islands, situated very close to one another, off the coast of Italy. Yet women in Corsica, which is French territory, have more children than women in Sardinia, which is Italian. 

Have French people simply always had more children than those in other European countries? No. In fact for many decades, France was the Sick Man of Europe in demographic terms. 

The French baby bust 

“It grieves me to say it, but I see firm proof of the imminent disappearance of our country.” – Jacques Bertillon, French statistician, in Le Problème de la depopulation (1897). 

The nineteenth century was one of declining birth rates across Europe, so that by the 1920s, more than half of Europeans lived in a country with a fertility rate below replacement rate of 2.1. But as outlined by economist Guillaume Blanc in Works in Progress, it was in France where birth rates fell first, a century earlier than anywhere else. I highly recommend you read Guillaume’s piece to discover the fascinating cultural drivers of this change. 

The French, including ordinary citizens, were greatly alarmed by their extended slump in births: a society called the Alliance nationale pour l’accroissement de la population française was created in 1896 to combat the scourge of depopulation and had 40,000 members by the 1920s, the largest of a number of such groups. After all, declining births was a matter of great geopolitical importance. France’s population had stagnated as that of its great rival Germany grew, leading to the production of posters showing two French soldiers being bayoneted by five German ones and explaining that for every five German soldiers born, only two French were.

What changed? How did France become Europe’s highest fertility country?

A century of pro-parent policies 

French women today have more children than those in any other European country because of intentional, government policy that made starting and having a family easier. For over a hundred years, the French people have benefitted from a series of pro-parent policies, primarily via the tax and social security systems.

France’s family social security programme began in the 1920s but was greatly expanded post WW2 in a set of reforms akin to the UK’s Beveridge reforms. Today, France is the highest spender on family benefits in the OECD. These family-related social security policies are divisible into four main categories. First, benefits to support families following the birth of a child and in their early years. Second, maintenance benefits to help parents support dependent children. Third, payments for families in special circumstances. And fourth, housing benefits. Here is a list of these benefits by category:

Birth and early years benefits

• Means-tested birth/adoption cash grant

• Means-tested basic monthly allowance from birth until child is three years old

• A child-rearing benefit to support parents who want to stop working or reduce their working hours to care for a child under the age of three

• Childcare supplement for working parents with children aged under six

Maintenance benefits

• Child benefit for those with two dependent children

• Allowance for those with at least three dependent children

• Means-tested income supplement for families with at least three children aged between three and 21 years old

• Allowance paid to top up a low child support award, or for children who are not receiving any support from one parent (or both parents, in which case the allowance is paid to the person raising the child)

Special circumstances

• Non-means tested education allowance for a disabled child

• Means-tested back-to-school allowance

• Daily allowance for any person looking after a child who requires constant care because of illness or disability

• A means-tested cash grant to parents upon the death of their child, including in cases of still birth after the 20th week of pregnancy

Housing benefits

• A house move bonus for those with at least three dependent children who move house before their youngest child is aged two.

• Family housing benefit for renting couples who have been married for less than five years and have or are expecting a child.

Importantly, this family social security programme has always included universal benefits as well as means-tested ones, so that all French parents have felt the effect of at least some of these policies, regardless of income.

France also has a very family-friendly income tax system called the quotient familial, introduced in 1945, that uses ‘income-splitting’ to reduce tax bills for parents in line with how many children they have. Under the French system, a married couple with two children earning £50,000 pays £2,458 in income tax. Under the UK system, they would pay between £7,956 and £11,978 depending on how their income is split between them.1

As written by Lyman Stone in his paper, France’s pro-parent policies may have durably increased France’s fertility rate by as much as 0.3 children per woman, leading to millions more French people in existence today. 

Conclusion

France offers a clear example of what can be achieved with pro-child policies that are administered consistently, over time. Yet it is also true that today France is again concerned about its falling birth rate, which has declined to 1.68 children per woman, incidentally the same low point that it dropped to in 1920.

Still, as recently as 2014, France’s birth rate was fairly steadily at 2 children per woman, very nearly replacement rate. But it slipped below 2 in 2015, the same year that the French government decided to cut or freeze some family benefits in order to save money. Even if France’s fertility decline since then is not attributable to that decision, and even if a fresh approach is necessary to see births in France rise again, the lesson of France remains the same: that policy can help more people to have more children.

Phoebe

Here’s a note to let you know that Boom is partnering with Civic Future to host a panel event on how the UK can kickstart a new baby boom, at 6.30pm-8pm on Tuesday 8th October at Public Hall, 1 Horse Guards Avenue, SW1A 2HU. You are welcome to join us!

As birth rates fall, there’s evidence that policies compatible with democratic values and aimed squarely at making parents’ and prospective parents’ lives better and easier can raise them again. We’re going to discuss the political challenges and opportunities these policies face in the UK.

Our speakers are:

• Ruxandra Teslo, author of the Yggdrasil Substack where she writes about technology and culture. Ruxandra is one of my favourite public intellectuals and her writing and thinking has gained an international audience with dazzling speed.

• Stephen Bush, columnist and Associate Editor of the Financial Times. Stephen is a brilliant and highly regarded political commentator, and his political insight is going to be very valuable in the discussion.

• Dr Aveek Bhattacharya, Research Director at the SMF think tank. Aveek is an economist who has been writing insightfully about the birth rate challenge for years (and supportive of Boom from the start!).

• Me, Phoebe Arslanagić-Little, director of Boom and Head of the New Deal for Parents campaign.

Sign up to come along on Partiful! There will also be drinks and the discussion will be followed by a Q&A. The panel will be chaired by the excellent Inaya Folarin Iman.

Phoebe

But as Japan’s birth rate has remained stubbornly low over the past twenty years, one community has successfully doubled its own. 

Welcome to Nagi 

Nagi is a town in the Okayama Prefecture of Japan, with a population of only 5,700 people. The town’s official mascot is a cuddly taro root, but the area is also known for its wagyu beef, wasabi, and rice paddies. Nagi’s local tourist attractions are modest: you can hike up Mount Nagi (look out for bears) or visit the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art, housed in an ox-blood coloured cube. 

In 2005, Nagi’s Total Fertility Rate (TFR) was 1.41 children per woman, a little above Japan’s TFR of 1.2 but not remarkably so. Yet by 2014, Nagi’s TFR was 2.8 – not only a staggering increase, but well above replacement rate fertility of 2.1. And by 2019, it had climbed again to 2.95. 

As of 2021, Nagi’s TFR has slipped slightly but remains at an impressive 2.68 children per woman. Astonishingly, 47% of all Nagi households have three or more children. This is in a country where nearly 50% of households with children have only one child, and those with three or more account for only 12.7%. 

Nagi chooses children.

In 2002, Nagi was concerned about its future as an ageing community. Mayor Masachika Oku told the LA Times that the town decided to implement cost-cutting measures and free up cash to invest in a new plan for its future: the prioritisation of children and young families. 

Nagi began by introducing a baby bonus of 100,000 yen – then around $1000 – for parents upon having a second child and made healthcare free for children until junior high school. Since then, Nagi’s offer to parents has only expanded.

Today, the baby bonus begins with a couple’s first, rather than second child and healthcare is free for children throughout high school. In 2007, the Nagi Child Home opened, acting as a social and support hub for parents but also offering childcare for $2 an hour while parents run errands (similarly informal childcare offered by a babysitter would usually cost around $13 an hour in Japan). A housing assistance programme offers young families three bedroom homes for a subsidised monthly rent of 50,000 yen (around $340). 

Parents choose Nagi.

Part of Nagi’s success is certainly down to the fact that it has turned itself into a beacon for young parents and couples keen to start their families. Nagi’s mayor is explicit that part of the long-term plan to maintain the town as a living community is to encourage young people to move there. 

Yet Nagi is no top-tier economic destination. Its ability to encourage young people to relocate is undoubtedly hampered by the general trend of urban intensification in Japan. Young Japanese people are keen to move to big cities like Tokyo, not to rural communities like Nagi. This exodus has left the Japanese countryside littered with abandoned homes that nobody wants.

And while Nagi does offer employment opportunities, they are heavily concentrated in industry and agriculture. The town’s nearest train station is a half hour drive away, and it would take you over three hours to reach Tokyo by public transport (and double that if you drove). 

In short, though Nagi’s forward thinking policies undoubtedly draw families and prospective parents looking for a community that will support them and this is a contributor to Nagi’s success, I think there are other contributors to its astonishingly high fertility rate. Namely, the effect of consistent pro-child policies in making having a family easier and the culture these policies have created.

A self-propelling culture of parenting

It’s clear from numerous media interviews with resident parents that Nagi’s ongoing commitment to making their lives better has made it easier for them to start families and have an extra child. But these policies have also likely been successful in creating a positive self-propelling culture of parenting. Yuko Sugawara – a Nagi resident who spoke to The Guardian last year when she already had one child and was pregnant with her second – exemplified this when she said of moving to the town and its child-friendly policies:

“It’s not really about the money…We want our daughter to have a little brother and sister…And when you look around and see families with three or even four children, you think, we can do that too.”

Nagi is reaping the benefits from consistently and practically choosing to make life easier for parents wherever it can. But these policies are strengthened by positive, reverberating cultural effects. By simply knowing more people with children and with larger families, Nagi residents like Yuko are encouraged to feel that having another child is achievable for them too. The town’s policies are then there to support them practically with that decision. 

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Conclusion

Practicality, consistency & universality

Nagi is frequently visited by senior national politicians and officials from other Japanese regions keen to understand and replicate its success, as well as by international delegations. Though it is much smaller, Nagi’s story is reminiscent of another region that Boom has written about: South Tyrol, the province defying Italy’s birth dearth. Like the people of Nagi, South Tyroleans have benefitted from decades of practical, child-friendly policy making. 

The key, replicable lessons of Nagi and South Tyrol – two very different areas in very different parts of the world – are practicality, consistency, and universal support. Nagi and South Tyrol’s policy makers have focused on practical, positive policies to support parents. They have consistently maintained these policies, only ever expanding rather than narrowing them. And they have not attempted to heavily target these policies, but rather to focus on supporting all parents. In sticking to these principles, these areas have then likely benefitted from self-propelling cultural effects, as residents’ expectations and life plans are shaped by the example of those around them.

Phoebe

A key part of his plan was to raise the amount of social security received by low-income households. But in boosting benefits, Brown inadvertently boosted something else: births. 

The Working Families’ Tax Credit

In 1999, Brown introduced the Working Families’ Tax Credit (WFTC), decreasing families’ tax bills based on household income, number of children, and number of hours worked. WFTC was specifically intended to benefit low-earning families with children and was considerably more generous than its predecessor, Family Credit. WFTC’s eligibility criteria was broader than Family Credit’s, it covered a greater percentage of childcare expenses, and it was worth more per child. 

Gordon Brown’s 45,000 Babies

WFTC had a number of labour market effects. It encouraged more single mothers into work and increased the hours worked by parents with dependent children. But most interestingly for me and all who believe policy can help more people have children, it caused a mini-baby boom.

In 2008, three economists published an IFS paper in which they identified that the introduction of WFTC had caused an extra 45,000 babies to be born between 1999 and 2003. The authors – Mike Brewer, Anita Ratcliffe, and Sarah Smith – found that this fertility effect had occurred in the groups most affected by Brown’s reform, and that the increase in births could not be attributed to other factors, such as pre-existing fertility trends in these groups. 

Enthusiastically responding to the paper, then Lib Dem-Treasury Spokesman Vince Cable said that Brown “hasn’t just saved the world, he seems to have created an army of children to populate it”. Gordon Brown himself never appears to have commented on the finding. 

Those 45,000 babies represent 1.31% of all UK babies born between 1999 and 2003: over 1 in 100 babies born over those four years was a Gordon Brown baby. Those babies – now aged 21-25 – have started their adult lives. Today they are busy studying, or taking up places on grad schemes, or handing you coffee, or starting their own families. 

Conclusion

Recall that Gordon Brown’s mini-baby boom was an unintended side-effect of the goals of relieving child poverty and getting more parents into work. It was not the result of intentional pro-child policy, yet we are all still enjoying the benefits of an extra 45,000 friends, colleagues, partners, and employees directly because of it. In making families more financially stable, WFTC allowed more parents to have the children they wanted.

The 45,000 WFTC babies show us how policy can make things easier for parents and prospective parents, and so directly cause more children to be born. But they also indicate how powerful a well-targeted policy – one that explicitly wants to help parents have the children they want – could be.

Phoebe