Global Models of Development, Rights, and Low Fertility, 1960–2020

• In Event: Politics and Population Processes

Abstract

Why has low fertility become a global phenomenon? First arising in industrialized countries, low fertility now characterizes a wide range of societies and has become a focal point of political anxiety, policy intervention, and public debate. I argue that low fertility emerges from globally diffused institutional agendas that redefine reproduction as a matter of state responsibility linked to development planning, and as a matter of individual rights and choice. Drawing on cross-national panel data for 146 countries from 1960 to 2020, I examine how international organizations, treaties, conferences, and advocacy networks—promoting a variety of agendas including state population planning and control as well as women’s rights and child rights – shape national fertility outcomes. Country fixed-effects models show that fertility rates are lower both in countries more deeply integrated into these global frameworks and during periods when such norms are more globally salient, net of domestic factors. These findings reframe low fertility as a patterned institutional outcome of global governance, helping explain why fertility decline has become both widespread in contemporary societies.

Author

• Risako Ninomiya, University of California-Irvine