Is Low Fertility in High-Income Countries Here to Stay?
March 3, 2026
Across high-income countries, fertility rates have fallen to record lows. In exploring this phenomenon, the key policy questions are: 1) why is this trend occurring? and 2) what, if anything, can be done to reverse it? For example, the finances of pay-as-you-go programs like Social Security are adversely affected by falling fertility, with fewer workers paying for more retirees. Indeed, Social Security’s 75-year deficit is 18 percent higher as a share of payroll if fertility remains on its current lower track than if it follows the Social Security Administration’s more optimistic intermediate assumptions.1 This brief, based on a recent study, reviews the academic literature on falling fertility and its responsiveness to policy.2
The brief proceeds as follows. The first section documents the fertility declines across an array of high-income countries. The second section focuses on “why,” assessing several potential explanations. We consider standard economic reasoning focusing on prices and income and we also introduce our concept of “shifting priorities,” which incorporates the potential role of broader social forces. The third section looks at whether standard policy prescriptions can significantly influence the fertility rate. The final section concludes that we may need to go beyond such proposals to have an impact. Increasing the fertility rate in the short term will be difficult. Changing the landscape in which young women and couples chart their future life course in a way that makes childbearing a more desirable alternative is harder, but more likely to be successful in the longer term.
