OXPOP
Oxford Centre for Population Studies
Working Paper Series no. 15
Population Decline
(another version published 2003 in Demeny, P. and G.
McNicoll (eds) Encyclopaedia of Population. New York,
Macmillan Reference. Volume 2 pp 732-737. ISBN 0-02865679-2)
David Coleman, Professor of Demography, University of Oxford
Department of Social Policy and Social Work
Barnett House, 32 Wellington Square
Oxford OX1 2ER
+44 (0)1865 270345 tel
+44 (0)1865 270324 fax
david./[email protected]
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http://www.apsoc.ox.ac.uk/oxpop
Population Decline
in Demeny, P. and G. McNicoll (eds) Encyclopaedia of Population. New York, Macmillan
Reference Volume 2 pp 732-737. ISBN 0-02-865679-2
Introduction
Population decline was a frequent experience until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
when population growth became the norm. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, that
era of growth was ending. In Europe, population decline is expected to become general by the
mid-twenty-first century, and by the end of the century, global population itself may be
falling.
Dynamics of Population Decline
Fewer births, more deaths, and net emigration can each provoke population decline: the basic
“balancing equation” can be expressed as: population change = births - deaths ± net migration
With modern mortality, where most children survive, each woman needs to produce on
average just over two children to replace the population over a generation (25 to 30 years).
Average family size is measured by the Total Fertility Rate (TFR), the number of children
which the average woman would have over her fertile lifetime (conventionally, ages 15 to
49), given current fertility rates at each age. A TFR of 2.11 implies that women would have,
on average, 2.11 children at current rates1.03 girls and 1.08 boys (assuming the sex ratio at
birth to be 1.05). If the probability of females surviving to the end of the childbearing period
is 0.97, women with a TFR of 2.11 would have, on average, exactly 1.0 surviving daughters
to replace them: the Net Reproduction Rate (NRR) would then be 1.0. Other things being
equal, below-replacement fertility; an NRR below 1.0 or, roughly, a TFR below 2.1, implies
population decline in the long run.
In the industrial world since the 1970s, and increasingly in the developing world, the TFR has
fallen below 2.1 and the NRR below 1.0. Yet most of these populations continue to grow,
partly because of immigration (e.g., Germany and Italy). However, most Western countries
still have a positive natural increase (excess of births over deaths). Births can exceed deaths
for a time, even when the TFR is less than 2.1, if the number of mothers entering their
reproductive years is increasing as a legacy of past population growth or bulges such as the
“baby boom” cohorts of the 1960s. Only when the number of new mothers ceases to grow
will deaths finally exceed births. This delay is known as population momentum. It can propel
growth only for a few decades; population momentum was ending in most Western
populations by the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Momentum operates in both directions. A declining population with a structure that had
become aged through years of below-replacement fertility would continue to decline in
numbers for some years, even if fertility increased to replacement rate (this is the case, for
example, in Germany).
Population decline in the past
For millennia, until the eighteenth century, average long-term rates of human population
growth must have been close to zero. Periods of mild population decline would have been
almost as normal as periods of population growth, and except for crisis years, no more
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perceptible. “Normal” processes served to regulate populations through alternating periods of
mild growth and decline, as in early modern Western Europe. There, the birth rate could fall
during hard times through delayed marriage, then rise again as circumstances improved, as
first described by Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834).
Deleterious changes (e.g., human mismanagement of resources) can reduce carrying capacity
through deforestation or the exhaustion or salination of soils, as in ancient Sumer, the Mayan
regions of Central America, and Easter Island. Exogenous climate change helped to eliminate
the mediaeval Vinland and Greenland colonies and almost did the same to Iceland. Other
crises were provoked by institutional collapse, new diseases, or warfare, which reduced
population irrespective of carrying capacity. At various times in the past, epidemics and
famines provoked frequent, sharp but often transient turndowns in population in Europe,
China, India, Japan, and elsewhere. Disease usually kills most of the victims of famine. The
destruction by blight of the Irish potato staple in 1846 left one million dead. Two million
Irish emigrated, inaugurating a new regime of emigration in which Ireland was the only
major European area to lose population in the nineteenth century, its size falling from 8
million to 4 million. However, massive famines of the twentieth century, causing population
decline if only for brief periods, were mostly manmade: China's Great Leap Forward of 19581963 led to some 30 million excess deaths; the Ukraine collectivization famine of 1932
caused 7 million deaths. The globalization of disease can radically reduce population size.
Europe’s population fell to two-thirds of its previous level after the Black Death of 1348. The
Aztec population was at least halved in the sixteenth century, partly through new diseases
introduced by the Spanish colonists.
In simple societies, depopulation can result from genocidal conflict. Attrition by nomads on
the settled populations of Eurasia suppressed the latter’s populations for a thousand years.
Europe lost about a quarter of its population in the centuries following the end of the Western
Roman Empire, and China may have lost a quarter of its population in its unsuccessful
resistance to Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century. The 30 Years War (1618-1648)
inflicted similar proportionate losses on much of Northwestern Europe. In the twentieth
century, the near-total destruction of Europe's Jews was the worst of a number of genocidal
episodes. Enslavement often followed conquest in earlier epochs, but in some cases
enslavement was the aim. The effect of slavery on the populations of tropical Africa cannot
be known exactly, but in some areas it clearly reduced population to a marked degree.
Contemporary Population Decline
As a broad generalization, in the 1930s the developed world reached a two-child family
norm. In 2000, the average TFR in the developed world was 1.6. At the beginning of the 21st
century, the United States was the only developed country with fertility approximately at
replacement level. In the medium term, sooner in some countries, the developed world faces
population decline. Countries with natural decline (deaths exceeding births) as of 2001
included Italy (-0.08% per year), Germany (-0.09%), most countries in Eastern and Central
Europe, and all of the European states of the former Soviet Union. Natural decline is fastest
in the Russian Federation (-0.63%), Ukraine (-0.60%), and Bulgaria and Hungary (0.48%).However, births in France, the Netherlands, and Norway still exceed deaths (their
natural increase is over 0.3% per year); in the United States it is 0.3 percent. Positive natural
increase also continues in the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Finland. East of the river Elbe,
population decline is exacerbated by persistent high mortality. Population decline in Italy and
Germany is only averted by immigration from Eastern European and non-European countries.
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Future trends depend primarily on birth rates and migration. According to the United Nations
medium variant projections made in 2000, France’s population is expected to grow to 62
million by 2050 from 59 million in 2000. Germany, however, is projected to decline from 82
to 71 million, Italy from 58 to 43 million, Japan from 127 to 109 million, Russia from 146 to
104 million. However, it is difficult accurately to predict population change so many years in
the future. The fertility rates in Russia and Eastern Europe in 2000 were deflated by
widespread postponement of childbearing, and may recover substantially. By contrast, in the
developing world where fertility in many regions is still relatively high, birth rates may not
cease to decline once they reach replacement level, as many projections have assumed. The
possibility or even likelihood of global population decline beginning within a century is now
accepted by demographers.
Political economy of population decline
Fear of population decline, and policy designed to avert it, is almost as old as states
themselves. In the distant past, population was, with land, the chief factor of production.
Population increase was encouraged, often by means of conquest and enslavement; its
diminution to be avoided at all costs. Mercantilist emphasis on population size, even at the
cost of individual standards of living, was reinforced by concerns about the size of armies and
the security of territory. Some classical economists assumed that Malthusian population
theory and diminishing returns would eventually end economic and population growth,
leading to a stationary population. Others, however, including Adam Smith, saw further
growth through productivity driven by technology. Population growth was seen as desirable:
it would expand markets and encourage division of labour. Larger populations permitted
economies of scale and increasing rather than diminishing returns, even though resource
constraints imposed ultimate limits to growth
Economic analysis of the consequences of declining population (e.g., the work of W. B.
Reddaway) began when birth rates first fell to replacement rate in the 1930s. IN 2002, some
economic opinion believed that population decline would remove the guarantee of future
customers that underwrites future investment, diminish the size of markets, and reduce
productive capacity as the workforce falls and as the stimulus for innovation declines. The
economist Ester Boserup feared, at the extreme, that society would decline to a more
extensive, less specialized level. For Julian Simon, population was the “ultimate resource”:
fewer people means fewer geniuses.
In Western democracies, France has shown the most consistent policy response to the fear of
population decline, nurtured by the stagnation of its population in the nineteenth century.
France, which began the nineteenth century as Europe’s demographic, military, and economic
superpower, ended it just on a par with the United Kingdom and Germany. Near-defeat in the
First World War reinforced fears about declining power and population. The official Institut
National d’Etudes Démographiques (INED) was set up to analyze population trends and
develop effective pro-population policies. Its first director, the demographer Alfred Sauvy
(1898-1990), was an indefatigable analyst of the economic and social evils of depopulation
and population aging.
With low vital rates, population decline goes hand-in-hand with population ageing. The latter,
however, provokes different concerns: of excess consumption by an increasing proportion of
elderly dependents, rather than the under-consumption arising from population decline feared
by the British economist John Maynard Keynes.
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Other considerations can prevail in crowded Europe. The United Kingdom’s Royal
Commission on Population (1949) and its Population Panel (1973) felt that the end of
population growth would moderate problems of food imports and balance of payments. The
latter report concluded that ‘Our analysis… leads us to the conclusion that Britain would do
better in future with a stationary rather than an increasing population (Population Panel, p.
6). The Netherlands has long considered itself overpopulated; up to the 1950s it sought, like
the United Kingdom, to encourage emigration to ease domestic population pressure. That
remains part of the rationale for contemporary policies seeking to discourage immigration.
Even in the United States, the 1972 concluding report of the Commission on Population
Growth and the American Future saw an end to U.S. population growth, although not a
decline, as, on balance, advantageous. Population growth is commonly regarded as a major
cause of environmental degradation, the reduction of biodiversity, and the destruction of
countryside; on environmental grounds, the prospect of population decline is usually
welcomed. An “optimum” population size has been proposed for countries such as the United
Kingdom of a third or less of the existing total (20 million). Australian environmentalists,
arguing from considerations of sustainable environmental footprint (the area of land needed
to sustain the current consumption or lifestyle of a community or country) desire a population
of 10 million, half its 2002 size.
While population decline brings problems, it may be argued that a smaller but stable
population has advantages. Problems of overcrowding are ameliorated and the environment is
potentially better protected. Unsatisfactory infrastructure, hastily constructed to cope with
growth, can be demolished. Labour shortage may reduce unemployment and moderate
inequality, and should promote capital substitution as wages rise. Depopulation after the
Black Death in Europe helped to end feudalism and ushered in the “golden age of the
peasant.” With international trade and alliances, markets and security transcend frontiers; in
Western Europe there is no relationship between the standard of living and population size or
rate of population change. Some European countries have lost territory and (in most cases)
inhabitants over the last century (United Kingdom, Germany, Austria), without harming their
standard of living. The universal loss of colonies has been a beneficial relief to the former
colonizers.
Policies Affecting Fertility and Population
Continental European countries took fright at the below-replacement fertility of the 1930s
and instituted wage supplements, loans, and cash benefits to promote family life and the birth
rate. In the post-World War II West (except in France), explicit pronatalist measures were
discredited by their enthusiastic adoption by pre-war Fascist regimes and were rendered
moot, at least temporarily, by the baby boom. Post-war communist regimes in Eastern
Europe, faced with rapid falls of fertility, espoused similar policies, which helped to preserve
a birth rate around the replacement rate until the collapse of communism. Pronatalist polices
to avert impending population decline and moderate population ageing in Japan, in
Singapore, and elsewhere since the 1970s have so far lacked conspicuous success.
Current Western European policies for child and family welfare are little different from
pronatalist policy, except that the demographic rhetoric is lacking and with exceptions (e.g.
France) there are no special benefits for higher-order children. Measures include cash
transfers and tax relief for parents, priority to families with children for subsidized housing,
paid parental leave, and subsidized child care. The effects these policies have on birth rates
are not easily demonstrated, but in Northwestern European countries, where they are best
developed, both female workforce participation and birth rates are relatively high, at least in
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comparison to countries where such policies are absent, as in the more “familist” Southern
Europe and East Asia. Central, Southern, and Eastern European and East Asian countries face
the prospect of the sharpest population declines.
In the latter part of the twentieth century European countries had tended to adopt restrictive
immigration policies. But by the end of the century, European political and media opinion
tended to see immigration as salvation from population decline and population ageing. The
notion that immigration can solve population ageing can quickly be dismissed: preservation
of current support ratios that is, the ratio between persons of labour force age and persons of
retirement age would require very high levels of immigration, generating wholly infeasible
rates of population growth. In the case of the Republic of Korea, according to a United
Nations calculation, that country would require 6.2 billion immigrants (equaling the world’s
population as of 2002) by 2050. Future population decline could be averted by more modest,
but substantial and fluctuating, levels of immigration: an average of 324,000 persons per year
to Germany, 312,000 to Japan, a total inflow of some 16 or 17 million each by 2050. In the
end, however, immigration cannot substitute for reduced birth rates. Any population trying to
maintain its numbers by importing people to compensate for below-replacement fertility
would eventually be replaced by the new immigrants.
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