3.7 - Total Fertility Rate

Learning Objectives

Introduction and Global Trends

• Impact on Population: A higher TFR leads to a higher birth rate, which means a higher population growth rate.

• Global Trend: From 1960 to 2015, the global TFR has steadily decreased.

• Current Level: As of 2024, the global TFR was about 2.2 (UN World Population Prospects 2024), down from about 5 in the 1960s. More than half of all countries, home to about two-thirds of the world’s people, are now below replacement level.

Replacement Level Fertility (RLF)

• Developed Nations: In wealthier countries, RLF is usually about 2.1. The 2.0 replaces the mother and father. The extra 0.1 is there because slightly more boys than girls are born (about 105 boys for every 100 girls), and because a few girls die before they’re old enough to have children.

• Less Developed Nations: Here the RLF is higher, more like 2.5 or 2.7. This is because the infant mortality rate (IMR) is higher in these countries, so more children have to be born just to keep the population stable.

TFR and Infant Mortality Rate (IMR)

• High IMR in Poor Nations: In less developed countries, IMR is much higher because of less access to healthcare, reliable food sources, and clean water.

• Mothers’ Health Care and Nutrition: Whether a baby survives its first year depends a lot on the mother’s access to good health care and nutrition: prenatal checkups, a trained health worker at the birth, enough food during pregnancy (so babies aren’t born underweight), and support for breastfeeding. Vaccines and clean water matter too. Without these, more infants die from premature birth, infections, diarrhea, and malnutrition.

• Replacement Children: That high IMR pushes TFR up, since women feel the need to have more children overall to make up for the ones lost in infancy.

• The Driving Force Behind the Global Trend: As countries develop and gain access to better resources and healthcare, their IMR drops. That means less need for replacement children, so TFR drops too. This is a major reason global TFR has been falling. The data backs this up: countries with higher IMR also tend to have higher TFR.

• IMR Changes Over Time: As these factors improve, IMR falls. The global IMR dropped from about 64 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to about 28 in 2024 (UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation). The gap is still big: about 47 in sub-Saharan Africa versus about 4 in high-income countries (2024).

Factors Driving Decreased TFR

• Education: As women gain access to more schooling, they learn more about reproductive health, which lowers the chance of unplanned pregnancies.

• Economic Empowerment: More education means more economic opportunity, like jobs or starting a business.
• Empowered women are less likely to marry early just for financial security.
• They are more likely to delay having children to pursue careers or more schooling, so they end up having fewer children over their lifetime.

• More developed countries offer more access to family planning resources.

• These include counseling centers and educational programs about choosing when to have children and how to avoid unplanned pregnancy.

• They also include medical access to contraceptives like oral birth control and condoms, as well as abortions.

• Less developed countries often have agrarian or agriculture-based economies.

• In those areas, a large family means needed farm labor and more income coming in.

• As countries develop, families rely less on agriculture for income, so the need for large families to provide labor goes away.

• Women who have their first child later have fewer years left in their reproductive window (roughly ages 15 to 49), so they usually have fewer children in total.

• Each generation also takes longer to turn over, which slows population growth even when family size stays the same.

• Example: In the U.S., the average age of first-time mothers rose from about 21 in 1970 to 27.5 in 2023 (CDC data).

Impact of Government Policies

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