Is half the world’s population really below ‘replacement-rate’?

Abstract

A perennial activity of demographers is to estimate the percentage of the world's population which is above or below the 'replacement rate of fertility' [RRF].However, most attempts to do so have been based upon, at best, oversimplified, or at worst, simply incorrect assumptions about what RRF actually is.The objective of this paper is to calculate the proportion of the world's population living in countries with observed period total fertility rates [TFR] below the respective calculated RRF, rather than the commonly used measure of 2.1.While the differences between comparing TFR to 2.1 or RRF are relatively modest in many periods when considering populations at the national level, a significant difference can be observed in the near future based upon India's fertility and mortality trajectories.Our exercise represents a means of 'correcting the record' using the most up-to-date evidence and using the correct protocol.This conclusion was widely reported and cited.To take a few illustrative examples, Myrskyla ¨et al. [3] cite the study in their influential 2009 Nature paper on the relationship between fertility and Human Development Index, stating that 'more than half of the global population now lives in regions with below-replacement fertility (less than 2.1 children per woman).'

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.