Lessons: Birth Trends in the UK

An opinion piece in Saturday's Globe and Mail, The Coming Baby Bust, came as I was looking at UK BMD data. Timely. It pointed out that:

Canada is not immune to such (population) decline. Our fertility rate is low; the crippling economic recession that we face could force it down even more. And closed borders make it impossible to bring in the hundreds of thousands of permanent residents this country counts on each year to make up for its missing babies.

The good news is that once the border reopens, we will be uniquely situated to bring in the brightest and the best from around the world, even as the United States and Europe close their doors. The next million new Canadians could be the most important immigrants of all.

The UK data I looked at is the dataset Vital statistics in the UK: births, deaths and marriages at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/datasets/vitalstatisticspopulationandhealthreferencetables which shows trends for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland from 1887 to 2018. 

The chart of births below shows annual deviation from the long-term mean as a percentage.

The general evolution of births is similar for all three. Births have been decreasing since the beginning of the 20th century, most notably for Scotland

Birth spikes follow both world wars — something to avoid.

Notable depressions in births occurred during the wars, in 1977 and just after the millennium, both likely a consequence of immediately prior economic issues,

With women choosing to have fewer children a decline in population is inevitable without immigration. The G&M opinion piece claims "we need to expand our economy (through immigration) to stave off the worst effects of an aging population. The alternative is an impoverished country with too few young to look after the old."

While supporting an increase in immigration, taming the rise of the world population would not be a bad thing if it mitigates continuing environmental problems. Perhaps with technology, even in Canada, we won't need so many young people to look after the old.