Total fertility rate
The total fertility rate (TFR) of a population is the average number of children that are born to a woman over her lifetime if they were to experience the exact current age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) through their lifetime and they were to live from birth until the end of their reproductive life.
Not to be confused with birth rate.
As of 2023, the total fertility rate varied widely across the world, from 0.72 in South Korea to 6.73 in Niger.
Fertility tends to be inversely correlated with levels of economic development. Historically, developed countries have significantly lower fertility rates, generally correlated with greater wealth, education, urbanization, and other factors. Conversely, in least developed countries, fertility rates tend to be higher. Families desire children for their labor and as caregivers for their parents in old age. Fertility rates are also higher due to the lack of access to contraceptives, generally lower levels of female education, and lower rates of female employment. It does not significantly correlate with any particular religion.
As of 2020, the total fertility rate for the world is 2.3 and as of 2021 it is 2.23. The global TFR has declined rapidly since the 1960s, and some forecasters like Sanjeev Sanyal argue that the effective global fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate, estimated to be 2.3, in the 2020s. Projections of world human population indicate the transition from long-term growth to long-term decline during the period 2050–2070. The United Nations predicts that global fertility will continue to decline for the remainder of this century and reach a below-replacement level of 1.8 by 2100, and that world population will peak during the period 2084–2088.
Parameter characteristics[edit]
The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is not based on the actual fertility of a specific group of women, as that would require waiting until they have completed childbearing. It also does not involve counting the total number of children born over their lifetime. Instead, the TFR is based on the age-specific fertility rates of women in their "child-bearing years," typically considered to be ages 15–44 in international statistical usage.
The TFR is a measure of the fertility of an imaginary woman who experiences the age-specific fertility rates for ages 15–49 that were recorded for a specific population in a given year. It represents the average number of children a woman would potentially have if she were to go through all her childbearing years in a single year, subject to the age-specific fertility rates for that year. In simpler terms, the TFR is the number of children a woman would have if she were to experience the prevailing fertility rates at all ages from a single given year and survived throughout her childbearing years.
Related parameters[edit]
Net reproduction rate[edit]
An alternative measure of fertility is the net reproduction rate (NRR), which calculates the number of daughters a female would have in her lifetime if she were subject to prevailing age-specific fertility and mortality rates in a given year. When the NRR is exactly 1, each generation of females is precisely replacing itself.
Total Fertility Rate for Selected Countries [needs update]
Lowest-low fertility[edit]
The term lowest-low fertility is defined as a TFR at or below 1.3.[4] Lowest-low fertility is found almost exclusively within East Asian countries and Southern European countries. The East Asian American community in the United States also exhibits lowest-low fertility.[5] At one point in the late 20th century and early 21st century this was also observed in Eastern and Southern Europe; however, since then, the fertility rate has risen in most countries of Europe.[6]
The lowest TFR recorded anywhere in the world in recorded history is for Xiangyang district of Jiamusi city (Heilongjiang, China) which had a TFR of 0.41 in 2000.[7] Outside China, the lowest TFR ever recorded was 0.80 for Eastern Germany in 1994. The low Eastern German value was influenced by a change to higher maternal age at birth, with the consequence that neither older cohorts (e.g. women born until the late 1960s), who often already had children, nor younger cohorts, who were postponing childbirth, had many children during that time. The total cohort fertility rate of each age cohort of women in East Germany did not drop as significantly.[8]
National efforts to increase or decrease fertility[edit]
Governments have often set population targets, to either increase or decrease the total fertility rate; or to have certain ethnic or socioeconomic groups have a lower or higher fertility rate. Often such policies have been interventionist, and abusive. The most notorious natalist policies of the 20th century include those in communist Romania and communist Albania, under Nicolae Ceaușescu and Enver Hoxha respectively. The policy of Romania (1967–1989) was very aggressive, including outlawing abortion and contraception, routine pregnancy tests for women, taxes on childlessness, and legal discrimination against childless people; and resulted in large numbers of children put into Romanian orphanages by parents who could not cope with raising them, street children in the 1990s (when many orphanages were closed and the children ended up on the streets), overcrowding in homes and schools, and over 9,000 women who died due to illegal abortions.[15] Conversely, in China the government sought to lower the fertility rate, and, as such, enacted the one-child policy (1978–2015), which included abuses such as forced abortions.[16] During the national emergency of 1975, a massive compulsory sterilization drive was carried out in India, but it is considered to be a failure and is criticized for being an abuse of power.
Some governments have sought to regulate which groups of society could reproduce through eugenic policies, including forced sterilizations of population groups they considered undesirable. Such policies were carried out against ethnic minorities in Europe and North America in the first half of the 20th century, and more recently in Latin America against the Indigenous population in the 1990s; in Peru, former President Alberto Fujimori has been accused of genocide and crimes against humanity as a result of a sterilization program put in place by his administration targeting indigenous people (mainly the Quechua and Aymara people).[17] Within these historical contexts, the notion of reproductive rights has developed. Such rights are based on the concept that each person freely decides if, when, and how many children to have - not the state or church. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, reproductive rights "rest on the recognition of the basic rights of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. It also includes the right to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence, as expressed in human rights documents".[18]