Income and fertility
[3][4] The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born in any developed country.
"[6] In 2015, this thesis was supported by Vogl, T.S., who concluded that increasing the cumulative educational attainment of a generation of parents was by far the most important predictor of the inverse correlation between income and fertility based on a sample of 48 developing countries.
However, in the last half of the 20th century it has become clear that the economic success of developed countries is being counterbalanced by a demographic failure, a sub-replacement fertility that may prove destructive for their future economies and societies.
[19] The review of the application of the traditional micro-economic models to the analysis of fertility decisions shows that, from economic point of view, children either are considered to yield utility directly, or are not desired for themselves, but are by-products of sexual activity or investment goods.
[21] This is a worrisome trend, since this shift in the timing of adulthood could seriously affect the labor supply of young people, overall fertility rates, and European pay-as-you-go pension systems.
A related concern is that high birth rates tend to place a greater burden of child rearing and education on populations already struggling with poverty.
[25] A United Nations report in 2002 came to the conclusion that sharp declines in fertility rates in India, Nigeria, and Mexico occurred despite low levels of economic development.
provided the evidence that associations between income and fertility or between sibship size and education, that used to be positive in developing countries in the 20th century, recently became negative: first in Latin America, then in Asia, and finally in Africa.
[28] This can be explained by the fact that countries with more traditional views of women's roles generally tend to have lower female labor force participation and higher fertility rates.
Numerous studies show that culture and ethnicity play a quantitatively significant role in explaining variation in women's work and fertility outcomes.
[39][40] In an article published in Nature, Myrskylä et al. pointed out that "unprecedented increases" in social and economic development in the 20th century had been accompanied by considerable declines in population growth rates and fertility.
This negative association between human fertility and socio-economic development has been "one of the most solidly established and generally accepted empirical regularities in the social sciences".
Myrskylä et al. contend that there has occurred "a fundamental change in the well-established negative relationship between fertility and development as the global population entered the twenty-first century".
More precisely, he found that in countries with a low human development index, higher levels of HDI tend to be associated with lower fertility rates.
Likewise, in countries with a high human development index, higher levels of HDI are associated with lower fertility rates, although the relationship is weaker.
