Concern over Nigeria’s expanding population has led to an IMF research that notes changing fertility patterns

A recent study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reveals “new fertility facts” that are questioning long-held beliefs about the relationship between childbirth, years of schooling, and income level. This comes in the wake of increased worry about Nigeria’s burgeoning population.

It notes that the only locations where the inverse association between income and fertility rate still holds true are low-income nations like Nigeria and other African nations.

According to the Population Division of the UN Department of Economics and Social Affairs, Nigeria would have 375 million people and rank fourth in the world in terms of population in 28 years.

The estimate includes a warning that the societal evils of overpopulation, such as unemployment, the food crisis, and crime rates, will worsen.

Up until last year, when the gross domestic product (GDP) gained the upper hand with a growth rate of 3.6% compared to the average population increase of 2.6% during the previous ten years, Nigeria’s growth has recently slowed due to the country’s rapidly expanding population. Even as the country is anticipated to have reached 216 million, experts are concerned about the severe consequences of overpopulation unless the country takes swift action.

While the IMF research titled “The New Economics of Fertility” highlights concerns about rising ultralow fertility in high-income nations like Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain, where the fertility rate has been around 1.5 over the past 20 years, Nigeria is worried about its bloated size.

The average of “just over two children per woman needed to sustain a constant population level,” according to the experts, is below the current rate.

The paper, which was released yesterday as part of an analytical series, examines well-established labour economics ideas including the quantity-quality trade-off, which contends that as parents become wealthier, they make expensive investments in their kids.

Parents prefer to have fewer children when incomes rise since this investment is expensive. It notes that historically, across nations and throughout time, there has been a strong negative correlation between fertility and GDP per capita.

It also brings to mind a different theoretical justification for low reproduction among high earners, which goes like this: “As salaries climb, dedicating time to childcare – time that could otherwise be spent working – becomes more expensive for parents, and especially for mothers. As a result, female labor force participation increases and fertility declines. Over time and across nations, there has historically been a substantial inverse relationship between female labor force participation and fertility.

The research contends, however, that fresh information shows the ideas are losing favor with the general public. However, it argues that low-income nations like those in sub-Saharan Africa continue to have a preponderance of the negative income-fertility link (SSA).

It is largely nonexistent in high-income countries as a whole. The connection between female labor force involvement and fertility is the same. We describe these new empirical regularities and go over the main explanations for fertility outcomes in a recent survey.

“High per capita income in a nation reliably predicted low fertility for a very long time. Poorer nations like Portugal and Spain had fertility rates that were still well above two children per woman in 1980, but just 20 years later, those same nations’ fertility rates had significantly changed. In fact, the study finds that the United States, the second-richest nation in the sample, had the highest fertility rate in 2000.

It also discusses how families in high-income nations are adjusting their fertility trends (such as France, Germany and the United States). It claims that the unfavorable correlation between female education and fecundity is waning in those nations, which is consistent with better salaries boosting the opportunity cost of raising children.

“This harmful association is less pronounced in US women from recent birth cohorts. In 1980, women with more than 16 years of education had the lowest fertility rate, but this is no longer the case in 2019,” the study finds.

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