Professor Jane Falkingham
speaker
15 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2012
last heard Oct 2012
Professor Jane Falkingham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Historically, for the last 20, 30 years, fertility has been falling right across Europe.
But actually, if we look at the most recent period, say across the last 10 years or so,
we see rises in fertility in the most advanced countries.
And in particular, if we look at countries in Scandinavia, for example, they now have the highest fertility rates in Europe, whereas in the countries we might have thought of having the highest rates, such as Italy and Spain, they actually have the lowest rates of fertility.
The work that's been done around this is actually by Francesco Bellari, who's a new professor at Oxford University.
So you might like to go and speak to him about it.
But then again... We've actually got population projections wrong consistently over the last 50 years.
And this is partly because we've underestimated the improvements in mortality...
particularly at older age mortality.
So we've got more people surviving into old age and living for longer than we previously forecast that we would have.
but also we've not been very good at spotting the trends in fertility.
The latest UN projections, which were published in 2010, predict if we take a medium rain projection,
that the world's population will grow to about 10 billion by the end of this century.
But if we take an upper range, it could grow to 16 billion, whereas the lower range shows the world's population actually shrinking down from its current 7 billion to around 6 billion by the end of the century.
And I think that the big issue, really, in terms of how fast the world's population continues to grow, is how fast fertility comes down in Africa.
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