AE Wk 11 Video News: Pressure to procreate: inside Hungary’s baby drive, The Guardian (23 February 2021) (15:42 min)

BACKGROUND

Even with the COVID pandemic many countries in the world face a different problem--not enough babies being born to keep their countries running. Some are calling it a "Baby Bust."

Today many countries around the world, including Hungary, are facing a crisis of ageing populations, declining birth and marriage rates, rising divorce rates, and emigration.  Dozens of countries across the globe face depopulation, with fertility rates below the population replacement rate, and other factors, threatening the very nature of their countries.  

The current fertility rate for Italy in 2021, for e.g., is 1.310 births per woman, a 0.46% decline from 2020 (Macrotrends Links to an external site. 2021).

"Replacement level fertility," the level of fertility at which a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next, is about 2.1 children per woman in developed countries (J. Craig, PubMed Links to an external site., 1994).

So less than about a 2.1 replacement level fertility and a country can no longer exist long-term as we know it.  As we saw early on in the semester emigration/immigration is an increasingly hostile option--as we have even seen in the United States in recent years.

In short, in dozens of countries throughout the world we may have  "A Crisis of Births":

Krause, Elizabeth L. 2005. A Crisis of Births: Population Politics and Family-Making in Italy. Belmont, CA: Thompson Wadsworth

Experts sound the alarm on declining birth rates among younger generations: "It's a crisis" Links to an external site.

-- CBS News (03 March 2021)

 For an update and other sources see

the class Demography WebPage

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