The fall in births is not a loss of love for children, but the inability to have them
The majority of humanity now lives in countries where women have on average fewer than 2.1 children — the threshold below which a population no longer reproduces itself. Two-thirds of the world’s population, according to the report published in July 2026 by the United Nations. This figure is less a warning signal than a reversal of perspective: the global decline in fertility is not, in its essence, the result of a loss of love for parenthood. It is the result of constrained renunciation, fueled by material obstacles that public policies have yet to overcome.
This shift changes everything about demographic policy. If couples had fewer children because they didn’t want them, governments would have little to do. But if the gap between the number of desired children and the number of children actually born is widening — which UN data confirms — then the question becomes one of the concrete conditions that prevent parental projects from being realized.
The Essentials
- Two-thirds of the world’s population lives in countries whose fertility rate has fallen below the 2.1 children per woman replacement threshold, according to the UN report from July 2026.
- The UN report identifies three main obstacles to the realization of parental projects: the cost of housing, employment precarity, and the instability of couples.
- Policies of direct financial incentives — allowances, birth bonuses — produce weak and often temporary effects on actual fertility.
- The UN’s revised projection anticipates a peak global population that is both earlier and lower than previous estimates, with lasting structural effects on pension and health systems in middle-income countries.
What couples say and what they do
Reproductive preference surveys — studies that ask women and men how many children they wish to have — reveal a troubling constant. In almost all low-fertility countries, the number of desired children remains higher than the number actually born. In Europe, the desire for fertility is clearly higher than observed fertility, which plateaus at 1.5. In Japan, the gap is similar. In South Korea, whose fertility rate reached 0.72 in 2023 — the lowest ever recorded in an OECD country — surveys show that a majority of young adults want children, but judge living conditions to be incompatible with raising them.
This gap between desire and reality is not a measurement artifact. It indicates that the decline in fertility is not primarily driven by a transformation of values — a growing preference for singleness, freedom, or childlessness — but by an accumulation of practical obstacles that delay or cancel projects initially formed. The UN report names three of them: housing, employment precarity, and union instability.
Housing first. In the world’s major metropolises — Seoul, Tokyo, Paris, Toronto, Sydney — the cost of adequate family housing represents an increasing fraction of the income of households in childbearing years. An extra bedroom is often the minimum condition for a first or second child; in many cities, it also represents a decade of additional savings. Employment precarity next: short-term contracts, self-employed status without safety nets, alternating employment and unemployment are not merely economic problems — they are psychological obstacles to committing to a twenty-year project. Finally, the instability of couples, correlated with the first two, delays births until the biological window begins to narrow.
Why checks don’t work
Faced with these figures, many governments have opted for the apparently simplest response: paying couples to have children. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary has multiplied birth bonuses and tax exemptions for large families. South Korea has spent over 200 billion dollars in the past twenty years on fertility support measures according to the Korean Ministry of Finance — without measurable results: fertility continued to decline throughout this period. Russia established “maternal capital” in 2006, a significant bonus for a second child. Fertility increased slightly for a few years, then resumed its decline.
Economic literature is relatively convergent here: direct financial transfers produce weak effects, often transitory, and concentrated in the lowest incomes. Economist Hippolyte d’Albis, a specialist in life-cycle economics, has documented this mechanism by emphasizing the temporal dimension of fertility decisions. What matters in his analytical framework is less the amount of a bonus than the anticipated income trajectory over the entire working life. A birth bonus compensates for a one-time expense; it does not alter the long-term calculation that leads to renouncing a child. What weighs in this calculation is the housing trajectory, employment stability, and the quality of public services that will take over parental responsibilities — childcare, schools, care.
This interpretation enters productive tension with part of the liberal literature, which tends to see fertility as a sovereign preference that public policy should neither regulate nor encourage. Tyler Cowen, among others, has argued that declining fertility in rich countries reflects a rational and informed choice by societies that value investment per child more than the number of children. The argument is not without merit: data shows that fertility declines with women’s education, and this correlation is observed globally.
But the UN report complicates this picture. If the disconnect between desired fertility and actual fertility is real and widespread, then at least part of the decline is not a choice but a constraint. The two readings are not mutually exclusive: some couples deliberately choose one child or no children; others renounce a desired child due to lack of material conditions. Relevant public policy addresses the latter, not the former.
Middle-income countries caught in the demographic squeeze
The most significant demographic development in recent years is not the decline in fertility in rich countries — a phenomenon well documented since the 1970s. It is its acceleration in middle-income countries, several of which have crossed the replacement threshold without completing their economic transition.
According to World Bank data, Bangladesh shows a fertility rate of 2.16 in 2023, still slightly above the replacement threshold but in rapid decline. Brazil has been below the threshold since 2005-2006, that is, since the mid-2000s. India, the world’s most populous country since 2023, has already fallen below the replacement threshold with a fertility rate of 1.9 — with enormous disparities between states. This movement is reshaping global demographics much faster than projection models anticipated.
The downward revision of the global population peak is a direct consequence. The United Nations now estimates that this peak could be reached sooner than expected — in median projections, around 2084 according to the latest published versions, or even sooner under low fertility assumptions. The level of this peak is also being revised downward. This is not a catastrophe in itself: a less populated planet experiences less pressure on resources. But the transition to lower demographics creates a period of structural discomfort to which social protection systems are the first exposed.
The problem for middle-income countries is more acute than for rich countries. France, Germany, or Japan have pension systems that, with necessary reforms — raising the retirement age, selective immigration, productivity — can absorb the demographic shock. This is the kind of trade-off that public debate can handle, albeit painfully. Competition for talent and population mobility is moreover a dimension that our economies already struggle to manage. But a country like Brazil or India, which is aging rapidly without having built the same institutional depth, finds itself having to finance the retirement of a large generation with a smaller working-age generation — and without the fiscal reserves that would allow it to cushion the shock.
What France succeeds at and what no one copies
France is one of the few European countries to have maintained, for two decades, a fertility rate close to the replacement threshold — around 1.9 to 2.0 until the years 2015-2020 — before beginning a more marked decline. Its rate has fallen back to 1.68 in 2023 according to INSEE (1.66 in metropolitan France), the value of 1.62 corresponding to 2024. But the French experience remains instructive: it illustrates that a coherent policy supporting family life can sustain fertility, even if it does not maintain it indefinitely in the face of economic and social transformations.
What distinguishes the French model is not family allowances in themselves — several countries do the same — but the architecture of public services accompanying early childhood: network of public childcare facilities, universal preschool from age three, supplementary parental leave. This system does not solve the housing question, and its quality varies considerably depending on territory and income. But it reduces the opportunity cost of parenthood for working women, which is one of the most documented determinants of fertility in rich countries.
Sweden offers a variant of the same model, with long parental leave that can be shared between both parents — a policy that has made it possible to increase the male fertility rate, a somewhat strange expression but statistically useful for measuring the actual sharing of responsibilities. In Nordic countries, the correlation between women’s professional equality and fertility is positive — contrary to the intuition that would suggest female emancipation mechanically reduces the desire for children.
The spread of these models encounters two obstacles. The first is political: long-term family policies mobilize substantial budgets whose effects are only visible at the scale of a generation — a horizon too long for electoral cycles of four or five years. The second is cultural: Nordic solutions do not easily transplant into societies where the sharing of domestic tasks remains highly unequal. In South Korea, for example, the combination of crushing professional workload and a still-prevalent traditional family model places women before a binary choice that many resolve in favor of career.
The demographic horizon for the next forty years
Demographic projections are by nature exercises in hypothesis. But certain trends are now sufficiently advanced to be treated as data of the problem rather than as scenarios among others. The decline in fertility in middle-income countries is not reversible in the short term. The aging of populations in rich countries is under way for several decades, regardless of policies pursued. And the global population peak, when it arrives, will be followed by slow decline — not stabilization.
This picture has two direct consequences for institutions. The first concerns pension systems: their balance rests everywhere on an active/retiree ratio that is structurally deteriorating. Reforms do not eliminate this fact; they manage its effects. In middle-income countries that have not built sovereign wealth funds or solid capitalization systems, pressure will be particularly strong in the 2030-2050 years. Demographics is not the only determinant of the sustainability of social systems, but it is a physical constraint on which public policies eventually hit a wall.
The second consequence concerns the geography of growth. Several regions in sub-Saharan Africa maintain high fertility rates — well above 4 children per woman in some Sahelian countries according to UN data — and will experience the strongest demographic growth in the coming decades. This is where the question of formal employment, which we have already documented through the case of Nigeria, becomes a global issue: a young population without formal employment, in economies that fail to create enough qualified jobs, is pressure on already fragile institutions. Demographics is here an accelerator of all other problems — not their primary cause, but their multiplier.
Lifting obstacles rather than buying births
The reversal of perspective proposed by the UN report has a concrete implication: if the decline in fertility is in significant part a phenomenon of unlifted constraints, then demographic policy is played out mainly on three grounds — housing, employment quality, and early childhood services — and not on direct financial incentives.
This is a reading that converges with Bruno Palier’s work on the political economy of labor and social protection: the structural determinants of family behaviors are less the prices of children than the conditions in which individuals can exercise their agency. Parenthood is not a good one buys; it is a project one undertakes when the conditions for its realization seem sufficiently stable.
Concretely, this refers to identified but slow undertakings: the construction of accessible family housing in dense areas, the extension of childcare coverage for early childhood, the reduction of precarity in contracts at the beginning of working life. These policies have effects on fertility, but also on many other dimensions of social well-being — which makes them politically more robust than birth bonuses, whose sole justification is demographic and whose effects remain difficult to demonstrate.
The question that remains open is that of timing. Engaged demographic trends will weigh on institutions over the next twenty to forty years, regardless of policy pursued today. The greatest number of children that an ambitious family policy could produce in the next ten years would not enter the workforce until between 2040 and 2050. Action on fertility is a very long-term policy. Institutional adjustments — pension reform, selective immigration, productivity — are short- and medium-term policies. The two are not mutually exclusive, but they respond to different horizons. This is perhaps the main lesson of the UN report: stop treating demographics as an emergency calling for quick solutions, and begin treating it as a fundamental constraint that requires institutions capable of thinking at the scale of a generation.
Sources
- UN News — Report on Global Fertility, July 2026
- Eurostat — Fertility Statistics and Reproductive Preference Surveys, European Union
- World Bank — World Development Indicators (fertility rates by country)
- INSEE — Demographic Overview 2023, France Fertility Rate
- Korean Ministry of Finance — Report on Natalist Policy Expenditures 2006-2024
- Hippolyte d’Albis — Work on life-cycle economics and fertility decisions (Paris School of Economics)
- UNFPA - Demographic Futures Survey 2026
- UNFPA - State of World Population 2025
- UN - World Population Prospects 2024
- OECD - Korea’s Unborn Future
- INSEE - Demographic Overview 2024
- Eurostat - Fertility statistics 2024
- Agência Brasil - Brazil below replacement since 2005
- CEIC/World Bank - Bangladesh fertility rate 2023