Tom Sasse

speaker

129 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 12 Jun

Tom Sasse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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But actually, if you look around the world now, over two thirds of all countries are below replacement rate.

We see middle income countries Brazil, Iran, Thailand, Turkey, that have been a long way below that rate for a long time.

But now poorer countries are joining them as well.

So Sri Lanka has a TFR of 1.3, Tunisia is one point six, Morocco has just fallen below replacement rate.

The most striking examples is that Nairobi, that's the capital of Kenya, may be approaching the replacement rate.

So these are not the kinds of places people think about when you think about low fertility.

And you're seeing these kind of falls happen, often despite marriage remaining near universal, and often even though few women are working.

So I think you can look at three really big factors.

So first of all, and demographers have emphasized this for a really long time, girls' education.

So when girls go to school, they gain more autonomy in life decisions, fertility falls.

It's no coincidence that in the nineties you saw a big surge in girls attending school in India and Africa, and that's starting to play out now.

And in fact, the places where we don't see fertility falling now are the places where you still don't have much formal education for girls.

So places like Niger, Chad, or northern Nigeria.

And the second factor is that once you have that education, you see parental aspirations rise, and then you get into a kind of educational arms race.

So India's a great example of this.

Almost 40% of

Indian children are now going to fee paying schools.

So a lot of parents are deciding to have fewer kids so that they can invest in sending them to better schools.

And that's risen very substantially in the last few years.

You can imagine a similar thing playing out in Africa as well.

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