Fertility rates have fallen rapidly across the globe in recent years. The total fertility rate (TFR)—typically measured as the average number of children a woman would have in her lifetime—is a standardised demographic tool used to project population growth and generational replacement. The global TFR, which stood at about five children per woman in 1950, is now approximately 2.2. Already, roughly seven in ten people worldwide live in countries below the replacement threshold of 2.1, and UN projections suggest that three in four countries will cross that line by 2050.
India is one of them; its TFR has held at 2.0 across two consecutive rounds of the National Family Health Survey. That is not unusual. Japan crossed the replacement line in 1957 at a per capita income of roughly $330 (in current terms), and China did so around 1991 at roughly $350—both far poorer than India is today. What helped Japan, South Korea, and China overcome those early declines was the subsequent decades of rapid growth that made them rich—or nearly so—before the deeper fertility crisis they now face. The question is whether India will follow the same path or grow old without ever converting its demographic dividend into tangible growth.
In the UK, the TFR has dropped from an average of 1.9 births per woman in 2010 to 1.49 in 2026. This sharp decline is not unique to England and Wales; fertility rates are falling across almost all high-income countries to levels well below replacement. For France, the TFR in 2023 was 1.6, compared with just 0.72 in South Korea. In 2026, France’s TFR remains between 1.6 and 1.8, while South Korea’s stands at a strikingly low 0.76.
Current theories have largely failed to fully explain the declining fertility trends both between and within populations. The well-cited reasons include increased education, rising economic costs, housing constraints, changing gender roles, and shifting personal preferences. Biological limits to the reproductive lifespan, particularly for women, mean that as family-starting is continually postponed, childlessness increases and mothers ultimately have fewer children. In Finland, for instance, levels of childlessness are high despite a relatively high completed family size: while one in five women born in 1977 remained childless, the average completed family size among those who did have children was 1.89.
Harvard economist and 2023 Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin, in her recent research, has established that the initial fertility drops in the US and Europe could be attributed to newly autonomous women and a mismatch between their expectations of family life and men’s willingness to alter existing domestic arrangements. Such arrangements benefit men more than women; where the odds are high that men will abandon their share of domestic duties, some career-oriented women forgo children altogether, while others delay indefinitely. This builds on her earlier work showing that legally accessible contraception in the early 1970s allowed women to plan long careers with the certainty men had always enjoyed—and it was then that US fertility first fell below replacement. Goldin’s recent conclusion—that the fertility decline may prove permanent, because it reverses only as fast as men change their behaviour—is unsentimental. This pattern repeats on a large scale globally. Women in Japan, South Korea, and Southern Europe gained unprecedented access to education and paid work but continue to bear the domestic burden almost entirely on their own; not coincidentally, these are the countries that have seen the sharpest fertility drops.
Renu Kohli, in her article in The Telegraph dated 21 July 2026, has analysed the declining fertility rate in relation to India’s old-age dependency and its impact on the economy. India’s old-age dependency ratio is projected to nearly double between 2021 and 2050—from 16 to roughly 30 dependents per 100 workers. Barely one in eight workers has any pension cover; formal pension assets as a share of national income are less than a quarter of those in advanced economies, and out-of-pocket healthcare costs hit informal-sector elderly workers hardest, with no pension to fall back on. Japan, Korea, and China each enjoyed several fast-growing decades between their own low-fertility crossings and their subsequent dependency squeezes. An India that fails to convert its workforce dividend into productive jobs would face a far shorter runway—and a far poorer one.
Among the widely accepted drivers of lower fertility are women’s empowerment, better bodily autonomy, increased literacy, greater access to contraception, and emigration. However, tracing low fertility rates exclusively to empowered women and their reproductive autonomy is problematic. While most educated women today may not face traditional barriers to reproductive choice (such as family pressure), they grapple with a very modern problem: capitalism and workplace compulsions.
Industrialisation, globalisation, and capitalism are increasingly linked to vanishing populations. There is a clear inverse relationship between capitalism and fertility rates worldwide. Fertility is a prerequisite for intergenerational transfers; a lack of procreation not only shrinks the labour force but also erodes the social fabric and intergenerational glue in the Western world, given the tipping demographic pyramid in most advanced capitalist economies. Access to economic markets is consistently correlated with lower fertility.
Julia M. Puaschunder, in her 2019 articleÂ
“Socio-Econo-Engineering: What is the Right Dose of Capitalism Regarding Fertility?”Â
(published in the Journal of Applied Business and Economics), made a central argument based on data from 180 countries: the pillars of capitalism are negatively correlated with fertility rates. Unregulated capitalism may lead to falling fertility, decimating the population and eventually reversing the pool of economic agents. Capitalism’s declining need for labour might be useful in curbing overpopulation in some territories, yet it can also precipitate a scarcely described societal decline in well-established market economies, where capitalism erodes itself due to a shrinking workforce. Within capitalist frameworks, fertility is perceived as both a contributor to overpopulation in some regions and a driver of labour underproduction in others. Access to markets and the pressure to participate in production and consumption curb people’s innate inclination toward parenthood. Conversely, tariffs and taxation are associated with higher fertility rates. The 2017 Economic Freedom Index reveals that economic freedom is negatively associated with fertility in the USA, and access to markets consistently crowds out fertility over time across different parts of the world.
Modern capitalism, which developed in Western Europe during the Industrial Revolution, has universalised money-based social relations, materialising in a consistently large, system-wide class of workers who must work for wages and a capitalist class that owns the means of production. In doing so, capitalism distracts humans from aspects of their humanness—including the impulse to procreate. Markets permeate society, and economic conditions shape people’s daily decisions. Individual market access forces choices under economic constraints, with both personal and societal consequences. A focus on efficiency and fitness in the economic equilibrating process may cause individuals to forget to procreate; so may the ample opportunities for entertainment and self-satisfaction found in capitalist societies. Training in utility maximisation can also create a trend toward maximising the welfare of offspring—prompting parents to limit their number of children in order to bundle more resources into fewer of them, which naturally drives the fertility rate downward. Moreover, individuals’ perceptions of the broader economy influence their spending, investment, and time-allocation decisions, including whether to devote their attention and resources to raising self-created offspring.
The continuous drop in global fertility rates cannot be attributed to any single cause; it is the product of a complex interplay between economic constraints, entrenched gender inequities, and the relentless pressures of libidinal capitalist modernity. As Claudia Goldin’s work illuminates, women’s hard-won autonomy is frequently undermined by stagnant domestic arrangements, while the broader logic of patriarchal capitalism—as Puaschunder demonstrates—actively disincentivises parenthood through utility-maximising norms and market-centric priorities that crowd out the time and resources needed for child-rearing. For India, the demographic dilemma is particularly acute: lacking the several decades of high growth that cushioned Japan, South Korea, and China after they crossed the replacement threshold, it risks growing old before it grows rich. This crisis demands more than pronatalist rhetoric or modest fiscal incentives; it calls for a profound recalibration of workplace cultures, affordable childcare, robust pension systems, and, most critically, a genuine renegotiation of domestic and professional roles between genders. Finally, the sustainability of our economies and societies will depend not on reversing the clock, but on reshaping modern life to accommodate—rather than obstruct—the fundamental human desire for family, ensuring that economic progress and demographic vitality can once again coexist. Women empowerment and their agency in every sphere of life can only defeat the logic of libidinal capitalist modernity which continues to remain patriarchal in its praxis.
