Birth rates continue to decline

The baby bust that we all know about has gotten worse in a way that isn’t yet widely understood.

Birthrates, which have been falling for decades, declined even more during the Covid pandemic. And they have continued to fall since, according to a report to clients by James Pomeroy, a global economist for HSBC, the London-based bank. It’s titled, “The Baby Bust Intensifies: How Bad Could It Get?” (Sorry, no link.)

Pomeroy didn’t wait for the official data collectors such as the United Nations to assemble data trickling in from national statistical agencies. He went out and collected the numbers from them himself. Some are provisional or don’t cover all the way through the end of 2023, and “some are produced from very interesting back corners of government statistics offices,” Pomeroy wrote to me in an email.

While the final numbers may come in marginally different, they’re unlikely to change the message of this chart below, which itself is slightly updated from the one that appeared in the bank’s report. In most of the countries for which Pomeroy managed to get data, the total number of births continued to fall steeply in 2023. The United States did better than most, with a decline of 1.9 percent. The Czech Republic, Ireland and Poland all experienced declines of 10 percent or more.

Read the rest here.