America’s fertility rate continues its deep decline
Wanted: policies that make it easier for mothers to work.
WHILE America’s job market has improved overall, employment opportunities for storks seem to be drying up. Last year, the total number of births in the United States fell to its lowest level in 30 years. The general fertility rate dropped to the lowest rate since the United States Centre for Disease Control started keeping records in 1909: to 60.3 births per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44. The total fertility rate, meanwhile, which estimates the average number of children a woman could expect to have over her lifetime at current birth rates for each age, at 1.76 births per woman, is below the “replacement rate” for fertility. That is the level that keeps populations stable (about 2.1 children per woman). And it is a considerable drop from a decade earlier, when the rate was 2.12 births per woman.
One obvious cause of these worrying figures is that women are having children later. The average age of mothers the first time they gave birth in America was 24 in the late 1980s and 26.3 in 2016. The teen birth rate has crashed to around a third of what it was in 1990. But it also suggests total fertility predictions may be somewhat pessimistic. As women have their first child older a statistical phenomenon called the “tempo effect” temporarily reduces predicted total fertility rates based on current births per age by as much as 25%. The tempo effect has some way to go in America, where the mean age at first birth is still nearly four and a half years younger than in the European Union.
History suggests that a rebound is possible. In 1976, the total fertility rate was 1.74, about half the level it was just 15 years earlier, before it slowly recovered. America, meanwhile, still has higher fertility rates than many European countries. In 2016, Spain had a total fertility rate of 1.33 and Germany 1.50. Ever fewer rich countries maintain a replacement fertility rate: out of 63 current high income countries for which the World Bank has data, only 22 saw total fertility rates below 2.1 in 1976; by 2016 this had risen to 57.
But America’s success at bucking this trend may be over. Historically, an important factor keeping birth rates in the United States high was immigration, which has brought in young people who desire more children than native-born Americans. But because the overall growth rate of the immigrant population has declined and a larger proportion of migrants now come from Asia than Latin America, births to new arrivals are slowing. Migrants from Asia have lower fertility rates than the native-born population. And fertility rates among Hispanics in America have been falling.
The recent recession has also played a role. When Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt of Northwestern University looked at the effect of unemployment rates on fertility they found that high state-level unemployment reduces the rate of child-birth amongst women in their early twenties at the time of high unemployment but also reduces their total fertility through to the age of 40. Cross-country analysis by Katharina Wesolowski and Tommy Ferrarini of Stockholm University similarly found that unemployment reduces fertility while higher female labour force participation is associated with higher birth rates. They suggest that general family-support policies like child payments have little effect on birth rates. But support that directly helps people combine work and parenthood, including leave for new parents, does have an impact.
That suggests that policies that make it easier for women to work and have children at the same time not only encourage more women to work, but more women to have children. If America wants to avoid a rapid population decline –and the challenges that presents to fiscal stability and economic growth—it should find ways to encourage more women into the workforce and treat them better once they get there.
Correction (November 1st 2018): This article previously stated that Hannes Schwandt was affiliated with Princeton. He is actually at Northwestern University. This has been amended.