South Korea broke its own record when it announced this week that as of 2023, its fertility rate had fallen to just 0.72 births per woman.
The rate at which a population replaces itself between generations without migration stands at around 2.1.
As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, the following map with comparable data between countries from 2021, shows that even then South Korea was one of only a few places in the world with a fertility rate below 1.
In Japan, which on Tuesday announced a 5 percent decline in births to a record low of 758,631, the birth rate remained at 1.26. This places the country among the approximately 90 in the world where populations are not growing independent of immigration. Also in this group are many nations from Europe, the Americas and Southeast Asia. Most of the countries losing fertility are better developed and reasons for the trend include greater access to contraception and more women being educated and heading to work.