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How many children are there in the world? Indicator: Population under age 18. Location: World. Note: If data are not available for a specific year or if the year has not been specified, the most recent data point will be shown.
Children under age 15, by world region 1950 to 2100, with UN projections. Children under age 5. Children under age 5, by world region with UN projections. Contraceptive prevalence: modern methods vs. any methods. Crude death rate: the share of the population that dies each year WHO.
Infant and Children under 5 Mortality; Urbanization and Population Density [Sources and more info]
How Many Children are in the World? Currently, there are an estimated 2 billion children in the world ages zero to 14 years old. Because of the declining fertility rates, this number is expected to peak in 2050 at 2.06 billion and then decrease to 1.9 billion again in 2100.
- Empowerment of Women
- Women’s Labor Force Participation
- Increasing Well Being and Status of Children
- Increasing Prosperity and Structural Transformation of The Economy
- Culture and Norms
- Religion and Fertility
- Family Planning
- Contraception
- Coercive Policy Interventions
- Fertility Is First Falling with Development – and Then Rising with Development
Women's Education
The level of education in a society – of women in particular – is one of the most important predictors for the number of children families have. Before I am looking at the data and the empirical evidence in the research literature that establishes why increasing education is leading to a declining number of children per woman we should ask why and how exactly women's education is linked to the choice about children. We should look at the theory.
Women's Education – Theory
The choice for having a child is a question of opportunity costs and education changes them Much of the theoretical work in recent decades on how families decide how many children they want rests on the models of the economist Gary Becker.6His framework models the demand for children in the way the demand for other goods in life are modeled, the demand for children is tied to the ‘price’ of a child. Price, in this framework, is thought of as a much broader concept then just the monetary costs...
Additional positive feedbacks of education
These effects of education on the fertility rates – which can amplify the effect on women's opportunity costs – is the topic of the following section. Positive feedback via the health of children There is evidence, which we discuss in our topic page on child mortality, that better education of mothers is having a positive impact on better health and lower mortality of the children. Further below I will review the evidence that lower child mortality in turn leads to a decrease of the total fer...
The increasing labor force participation of women is a second aspect of women's rising empowerment in society and this change too tends to lead to a decline of the number of children that women have. This change is so closely linked to the rising education of women discussed before that it is indeed impossible to separate from that. A substantial p...
Higher child mortality causes higher fertility rates
Rapid population growth has been a temporary phenomenon in countries around the world. Rapid population growth starts when the health of the population improves and the mortality rate in a population decreases while the birth rate stays as high as before. Rapid population growth then comes to an end when after some time the birth rate follows the decline of the mortality rate. The model of the demographic transition formalizes this relationship between mortality, fertility, and population gro...
Declining child labor reduced fertility rates
An aspect emphasized already is that the high number of children in the past is not an accident. Families wanted many children because they needed many children. In the agricultural, poor economies of the past children were contributing to the household productively from a young age on. Child labour was very common as we show in our topic page on child labor. This changed when the economy modernized. Hazan and Berdugo (2002)25document that with technological progress and the structural change...
More education for children made having children more expensive
In today's rich economies children have vastly more education than in the poor agrarian economies of the past. The basic argument for why the increase of education contributed to the decline of fertility rates derives again from the seminal work of Becker (1960) who argued that because of the costs of bringing up a child parents have to make a decision between the number of children they want (quantity) and the resources they want to spend on each child (quality). Limited resource force paren...
The following plot shows the close relation between the income level (measured by GDP per capita) and the total fertility rate. Shown are not just country averages of the fertility rate and income, the visualization is also showing the within-country inequality. Each population is split into 5 quintiles, from the poorest 20% to the richest 20%. Unf...
The change of fertility are a prime example for changing social norms. In many places around the world the practice of having more than 5, 6, 7, or 8 children, which was the norm for millennia, was replaced by the norm of having 2 children or fewer. We have explored socio-economic and technological changes that contributed to the declining rate of ...
Many religious teachings are asking the believers to have a large number of children. The Christian Bible for example teaches to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it”.43 This visualization shows the children per woman plotted against the share of children that die in the first 5 years of life. Each country here is colored acco...
Family planning refers to all active efforts to choose the number of children a woman or family wants. While the changes discussed before changed the incentives for having a larger or smaller number of children, family planning is focussed on the decision making and implementation of that decision on the personal level. Family planning involves the...
Women’s empowerment and the increased status of children reduce the number of children that parents want. But a goal of lower fertility is irrelevant if there are no means to achieve it. Methods of contraception give parents the chance to get the actual fertility closer to their desired fertility. Today there is a range of methods of contraception ...
How important was China's one-child policy?
A common claim—and one originated by the Chinese Government—is that China’s one-child policy has prevented approximately 400 million Chinese births. The view of many has been that this policy shaped a population age structure that contributed to economic growth (through the effect of the “demographic dividend”) and even contributed to global efforts to address climate change. But was the policy necessary to drive down fertility? But is it really? The chart shows fertility in China since 1945....
We have already seen that as a country develops – child mortality declines and incomes grow – the fertility declines rapidly. The demographers Mikko Myrskylä, Hans-Peter Kohler & Francesco Billari studied what happens at very high levels of development. To measure development they relied on the Human Development Index– a measure published by the UN...
The total population under 5 years old, given as historic estimates and projections to 2100 based on the UN's medium scenario.
The World Population Dashboard showcases global population data, including fertility rate, gender parity in school enrolment, information on sexual and reproductive health, and much more. Together, these data shine a light on the health and rights of people around the world, especially women and young people.
