Is the UN underestimating the global fall in fertility?
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BBC
4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 24 May 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Every two years, the UN release their predictions for the future population of humanity – currently expected to peak in the 2080s at around 10.3 billion people.
One of the things they use to work this out is the fertility rate, the number of children the average woman is expected to have in her lifetime. When this number falls below 2, the overall population eventually falls. In this episode of More or Less, we look at the fertility estimates for one country – Argentina. The graph of the real and predicted fertility rate for that country looks quite strange.
The collected data – that covers up to the present day – shows a fertility rate that’s falling fast. But the predicted rate for the future immediately levels out. The strangeness has led some people to think that the UN might be underestimating the current fall in global fertility.
To explain what’s going on we speak to Patrick Gerland, who runs the population estimates team in the United Nations Population Division.
Presenter / producer: Tom Colls Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown Sound mix: Sue Maillot Editor: Richard Vadon
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I'd like to introduce myself. |
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| 0:35.9 | Hello and thanks for downloading the more or less podcast. |
| 0:39.2 | We're the programme that looks at the numbers in the news and in life |
| 0:42.0 | and in graphs from the United Nations. |
| 0:44.7 | I'm Tom Coles. |
| 0:47.1 | Graphs are a particular challenge in our line of work. |
| 0:50.5 | The line goes up a bit, the line goes down a bit. |
| 0:53.6 | It's not exactly radio gold. |
| 0:56.0 | But sometimes there's a graph that does something so odd, even radio can do it justice. |
| 1:01.3 | The graph we're going to talk about today involves a line that plummetes downwards for five years, heading towards zero. |
| 1:07.2 | And then seemingly miraculously, at exactly the point at which it turns from data that's been collected to a projection of what's going to happen in the future, it stops falling and immediately the trend is flat. |
| 1:19.4 | Like a roller coaster that speeds downhill before abruptly flattening out, which is fun for a fairground ride, but a bit odd for a trend on a graph. |
| 1:29.9 | And why does this graph matter? Well, it's the UN's graph of the projected fertility rate in |
| 1:35.0 | Argentina. It's an extreme example of something you see in the UN fertility projections for some |
| 1:40.7 | other countries too. And the strangeness of those graphs suggest that maybe |
| 1:45.8 | something strange is going on in how the UN forecasts what the world's fertility rate will be like |
| 1:51.7 | in the future. So, what is going on? And could the UN's predictions be downplaying a global fertility |
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