There is a quiet catastrophe unfolding right now, one that doesn’t make nearly as many headlines as it deserves. Cities that once rang with the sound of children are growing older and stiller. Classrooms are emptying. Maternity wards are closing their doors. Across the world, some of the most powerful and prosperous nations are simply running out of babies – and by extension, people.
The global total fertility rate has more than halved over the past 70 years, plummeting from around five children per woman in 1950 to just 2.2 children in 2021, with over half of all countries and territories already below the population replacement level of 2.1 births per woman. Honestly, those numbers don’t fully capture the scale of what we’re talking about. For some countries, the drop isn’t just alarming – it’s existential. Let’s dive in.
South Korea: The World’s Most Extreme Case
If you’re looking for ground zero of the global fertility crisis, South Korea is it. In 2025, the fertility rate in South Korea was estimated at 0.68 children per woman, making it the lowest fertility rate worldwide. Think about what that really means for a moment. To keep a population stable, a country needs roughly 2.1 children per woman. South Korea is sitting at less than a third of that threshold.
South Korea’s population surpassed 50 million citizens for the first time in 2012, and peaked at approximately 51.77 million by the end of 2021. However, if current trends continue, researchers suggest the country’s population will shrink to approximately 28 million people by the end of the 21st century. That’s a potential population loss comparable to wiping out a country the size of Peru.
Seoul expended over $270 billion over the past 16 years on incentives to promote childbirth, according to a 2024 paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Yet the spending has barely moved the needle. For many South Korean women, a workaholic culture and ultra-competitive pressure in the workspace means that taking time out to have a baby is too much of a risk, in a country that already has one of the worst gender pay gaps in the OECD.
On June 19, 2024, the South Korean government declared a “Population National Crisis” and unveiled a plan to implement a nationwide response system, including the establishment of the Ministry for Population Strategy and Planning. There was a tiny sliver of good news in early 2025: South Korea’s fertility rate rose to 0.75 children per woman in 2024 from 0.72 in 2023, after eight consecutive years of decline. Still, nobody is celebrating just yet.
Japan: A Nation Shrinking Faster Than Predicted
Japan has long been held up as a cautionary tale. But the situation is now moving faster than even the most pessimistic forecasters imagined. The Japanese health ministry recorded 686,061 babies born in Japan in 2024, a drop of 5.7% on the previous year and the first time the number of newborns fell below 700,000 since records began in 1899. That milestone alone should have sent shockwaves around the world.
Just 705,809 babies were born in Japan in 2025, marking a 2.1 percent decline from 2024. The number of babies born in Japan fell for the 10th straight year. There is no sugar-coating this trajectory. The natural population decline – the difference between births and deaths – surpassed 600,000 for the first time in 2021, but has only accelerated since, reaching 782,305 in 2022, 831,872 in 2023, and 897,696 in 2024.
The younger generation in Japan is increasingly reluctant to marry or have children due to bleak job prospects, high cost of living, and a gender-biased corporate culture that adds extra burdens for women and working mothers, according to experts. The problem is cultural and structural at the same time. In 2024, the median age of Japanese people was projected to be 49.9 years, the highest level since 1950. Japan is, in practical terms, becoming a country of the elderly.
In 2024, Japan committed roughly $23 billion over three years to boost the birth rate through initiatives like expanded child allowances, subsidized fertility treatments, and workplace reforms. The scale of effort is enormous. The results remain deeply insufficient.
China: A Giant Quietly Hollowing Out
Here’s the thing – when we think of China, we still think of a billion people, of overcrowded cities and sheer demographic mass. That image is becoming outdated. Fast. China’s population dropped by 3.39 million in 2025 to 1.405 billion – a faster decline than in 2024. What’s more, only 7.92 million babies were born in 2025, down 17 percent from 9.54 million in 2024. This marked the lowest birth figure since records began in 1949.
During the years 1979 to 2015, China pursued a one-child policy that fundamentally redefined the culture and attitudes towards having more than one child. That experiment in demographic engineering is now exacting a long and painful price. A 2024 UN Population Prospects report reveals that China’s 1.4 billion people could shrink to 1.3 billion by 2050 and then plunge to 633 million by 2100.
China’s working-age population (aged 16 to 59) has been shrinking since 2012. Last year, nearly 7 million fewer people belonged to that cohort than in the previous year. This is the real economic time bomb ticking beneath the surface. Most families cite the costs and pressure of raising a child in a highly competitive society as significant hurdles, now looming larger in the face of an economic downturn impacting households struggling to meet their living costs.
In February 2026, the Cyberspace Administration of China mandated that social media platforms censor content deemed as spreading “fear of marriage” or “anxiety about childbirth.” That’s how desperate the situation has become. When a government starts censoring pessimism about parenthood, you know the problem has gone very, very deep.
Italy: A Demographic Winter in the Mediterranean Sun
Italy is often described with warmth – the food, the art, the history, the family culture. Yet beneath the picture-postcard surface, a deeply unsettling demographic story is playing out. The 370,000 babies born in 2024 marked the 16th consecutive annual decline and was the lowest figure since the country’s unification in 1861. That’s not just a crisis. That’s a collapse of multigenerational proportions.
Italy’s fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.18 in 2024, far below the 2.1 needed for a steady population. Researchers have a name for this: demographic winter. There were approximately 281,000 more deaths than births in 2024 and the population fell by 37,000 to 58.93 million, continuing a decade-long trend.
Since 2014, Italy’s population has shrunk by almost 1.9 million – more than the number of inhabitants of Milan, its second-largest city, or of the entire region of Calabria. Let that sink in. An entire major city’s worth of people, simply gone from the count. Underlining Italy’s rapidly ageing population, almost one in four residents are now above the age of 65.
According to a professor of demography at Luiss University, the country could face an economic “dark age” as the number of people entering the workforce declines. Pension systems built for different realities are now creaking under the weight of an inverted population pyramid. Italy has a stunning past. Whether it will have enough people to build a future remains a genuinely open question.
Lithuania: Europe’s Vanishing Heart
Most global conversations about demographic decline skip right past Lithuania. That’s a mistake. Lithuania’s fertility rate has dropped from 2.7 in 1950 to 1.2 in 2025. In 2015, more than 30,000 children were born in the nation, but almost 11,000 fewer births were recorded in 2024. For a country of less than three million people, that kind of reduction is existential.
Its current population stands at 2.8 million people, with more than one in five residents above retirement age. The district of Rokiskis is particularly notable, where deaths outnumbered births five to one. Five to one. That’s not a trend line. That’s a community in the process of disappearing.
Marriage and divorce rates in Lithuania are nearly identical, a trend locals have attributed to a combination of financial pressures, low wages and depopulation in rural areas. Additionally, individuals have cited the fear of war as a factor for not having children. Lithuania’s proximity to Russia and the ongoing shadow of geopolitical instability in Eastern Europe adds a layer of anxiety to an already fragile demographic picture.
Lithuania saw a drop of 12.8 percent in births between the first half of 2024 and the first half of 2025, among the steepest declines in the world. Eastern Europe has battled low population growth rates for years and is dealing with a “dual demographic challenge” with “very low birth rates and high emigration.” The young are leaving. The old are aging. The middle is collapsing.
Chile: The Americas’ Quiet Crisis
Not every country in this story is European or East Asian. Chile’s demographic freefall is one of the least-discussed in global media, but the data is striking. Chile’s fertility rate has dropped from 4.8 in 1950 to 1.1 in 2025. In the last decade alone, fertility rates have fallen by nearly a third. It is now the country with the lowest fertility rate in the Americas.
Several reasons explain such a downward trend, including Chilean women gaining greater access to education – particularly since universities became free in 2008 – as well as women entering the workforce in higher numbers. A lack of state support in areas such as childcare is another factor. In many ways, Chile’s story mirrors what happened in wealthier East Asian nations a generation earlier.
I think what makes Chile’s case so thought-provoking is how rapidly it happened. This is a country that went from a birth rate comparable to sub-Saharan Africa in the mid-twentieth century to approaching South Korean levels within just a few decades. According to Chile’s National Statistics Institute, the birth rate will continue to fall in the coming years. Even with an increase in immigration, numbers are still set to plummet.
Chile still has a relatively young overall population compared to Japan or Italy, which gives it a short window to act. But that window is closing. The demographic momentum that once sustained growth is slowing, and the structural reforms needed to reverse the trend – affordable childcare, stronger parental leave, housing support – remain works in progress at best.
The Economic Time Bomb Buried Inside Every Declining Nation
Let’s be real: population decline isn’t just about fewer people. It’s about fewer workers, fewer taxpayers, and a smaller economic engine trying to support a larger and larger group of retirees. As of 2024, population size has already peaked in 63 countries and areas, including China, Germany, Japan and the Russian Federation, and the total population of this group is projected to decline by 14 percent over the next thirty years.
What a 0.72 fertility rate means for South Korea is that for every 100 Koreans, they would have about 36 children at current levels, shrinking the workforce across generations. That would cut into productivity and slow growth, experts say. That mathematical reality plays out across every country on this list, scaled to their own circumstances.
Fertility rates are declining more significantly and at a faster pace than anyone anticipated a few years ago. This trend is evident in both wealthy and poor nations, in religious and secular states, in countries with right-wing governments as well as those with left-wing governments. Ideological differences don’t seem to change the direction of the trend, only the speed.
Why Aren’t Baby Bonuses Working?
Government after government has tried the obvious fix: pay people to have babies. The results are sobering. The UNFPA warns against simplistic or coercive responses to declining birth rates – such as baby bonuses or fertility targets – noting that these policies are largely ineffective. This finding comes from research spanning 14 countries representing over a third of the global population.
Drawing on academic research and new data from a UNFPA/YouGov survey, the report finds that one in five people globally expect to not have the number of children they desire. Key drivers include the prohibitive cost of parenthood, job insecurity, housing, concerns over the state of the world, and the lack of a suitable partner.
Japan threw billions at the problem. South Korea spent a quarter of a trillion dollars. Italy tried monthly cash payments. The birth rate has been falling again since the global financial crisis, and according to the OECD, this shows that family policy measures and an improved work-life balance are not enough to overcome the demographic challenges. The forces driving the decline are cultural, economic, and structural all at once.
What the World Will Look Like If Nothing Changes
The projections from leading demographic institutions are genuinely startling. Although by 2100 more than 97 percent of countries and territories will have fertility rates below what is necessary to sustain population size over time, comparatively high fertility rates in numerous low-income countries – predominantly in Western and Eastern sub-Saharan Africa – will continue to drive population increases in those locations throughout the century.
By the late 2070s, the number of persons aged 65 years or older is projected to surpass the number of children under age 18, while the number of persons at ages 80 and higher is projected to be larger than the number of infants under age 1 already by the mid-2030s. Think of it this way: the world will look like a retirement village with a shrinking staff.
In China, Japan, South Korea, and Thailand, deaths currently outnumber births; these countries have exhausted their demographic momentum, resulting in population decline. At the present rate, China could lose as many as 600 million inhabitants by the end of the century. The scale of that number is almost incomprehensible. 600 million is roughly twice the current population of the United States.
The Real Fertility Crisis: Choice, Not Rejection
Here’s something crucial that often gets lost in the panic: most people still want children. The problem is that having them has become too costly, too risky, and too structurally unsupported. Millions of people are unable to have the number of children they want, not because they are rejecting parenthood, but because economic and social barriers are stopping them. This is the central finding of UNFPA’s 2025 State of World Population report, “The real fertility crisis: The pursuit of reproductive agency in a changing world.”
More than half of people surveyed said economic issues were a barrier to having as many children as they wanted. Housing costs. Stagnant wages. The sheer expense of raising a child in a competitive modern economy. These are solvable problems – but only if governments treat them with the seriousness they deserve, rather than throwing small cash bonuses at deeply structural issues.
The 2008 financial crisis and its impact on housing, inflation and pay is generally cited as a major contributor to people’s decisions to delay having children, to have fewer children or not to have them at all. Parental leave and childcare come up just as often, with multiple experts saying that improved policies in these areas would be a game-changer. It’s hard to say for sure whether any single government will find the right combination of policies in time. But the window to act is narrowing by the year.
The baby bust is not a distant future problem. It is happening right now, in the schools being converted to care homes, in the villages where more coffins leave than cradles arrive, in the pension funds that will never balance again. The question is not whether these countries are running out of people. They clearly are. The real question is whether the world is paying enough attention to do something about it. What do you think – is this a crisis governments can actually reverse, or has the demographic tide already turned beyond reach? Share your thoughts in the comments below.