The population growth rate has experienced a collapse over the last decade. In 2015, the average number of children per woman was 2.77 in the Philippines; now, it’s only 1.55 kids. In 2015, the average number of kids per woman was 2.24 in Argentina; now, it’s only 1.14. In Costa Rica, the average number of kids has fallen from 1.76 in 2015 to 1.1 kids in 2025. In China, the number of kids has fallen from 1.75 to 1.1, while in the United States, the number of kids has fallen from 1.84 to 1.58.
“For years, it was treated as a demographic law: as countries grow wealthier, they have fewer children. Prosperity, it was believed, inevitably drove birth rates down. This assumption shaped countless forecasts about the future of the global population,” notes The Doomslayer.
But this turned out to be an oversimplification. Women are having more kids in wealthy America (1.58 kids) and well-to-do Denmark and Norway (about 1.5 kids), than in countries that are not wealthy, such as Colombia and Thailand, where women are having only about one kid, on average. On the other hand, people are still having lots of kids in Africa, which is even poorer still. In most African nations, women still have at least 3 kids on average, although the African birth rate is lower than back in 2020, when women in at least 7 African nations had 6 kids or more on average.
As The Doomslayer explains:
In many wealthy countries, such as South Korea and Italy, very low fertility rates persist. But a growing body of research is challenging the idea that rising prosperity always suppresses fertility.
University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde recently observed that middle-income countries are now experiencing lower total fertility rates than many advanced economies ever have. His latest work shows that Thailand and Colombia each have fertility rates around 1.0 births per woman, which is even lower than rates in well-known low-fertility advanced economies such as Japan, Spain and Italy.
“My conjecture is that by 2060 or so, we might see rich economies as a group with higher [total fertility rates] than emerging economies,” Fernández-Villaverde predicts.
This changing relationship between prosperity and fertility is already apparent in Europe. For many years, wealthier European countries tended to have lower birth rates than poorer ones. That pattern weakened around 2017, and by 2021 it had flipped.
This change fits a broader historical pattern. Before the Industrial Revolution, wealthier families generally had more children. The idea that prosperity leads to smaller families is a modern development. Now, in many advanced economies, that trend is weakening or reversing. The way that prosperity influences fertility is changing yet again. Wealth and family size are no longer pulling in opposite directions.
