This Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

After the baby boom comes the baby bust, and it has already begun. The mainstream forecasts for the world’s population project will be falling by the end of this century. The central estimate of the most recent United Nations World Population Prospects puts the global population topping out in the 2080s at around 10.4 billion, against its present 8.1 billion.

But since 2020, something remarkable seems to have happened. Since the pandemic, birth rates are falling even faster than seemed likely three or four years ago. Many people expected that as the disruption eased, the number of babies being born would bounce back. The reverse has occurred, as the decline has gathered pace.

The bank HSBC has just updated its work on what is happening, showing that in 2023 births fell on average by around 4.5 per cent. In some countries, the decline is really quite dramatic. In China, where the population is already falling, live births fell by 5.6 per cent, in Germany by 6 per cent, and in South Korea and Ireland by around 8 per cent. These are HSBC estimates, and they didn’t give a number for the UK, but official figures show that births in England and Wales fell by 3.1 per cent in 2022 and a further fall of that scale would be consistent with the rest of the world.

HSBC comments: “As things stand, we’re on a path of the world’s population to start shrinking before 2040, with developed markets already on a path to dramatic population decline over the course of the next few decades. This may, of course, change, if some of these factors turn around, but there’s nothing in the data to suggest that they will.”

If this is right, we will have to rethink just about everything. By the end of this century, far from continuing to climb, the world’s population will have halved.........

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