The Global Population Is Peaking Earlier Than Anyone Predicted – The Economic Consequences Are Profound.

On a weekday afternoon, stroll through the maternity ward of any large hospital in Tokyo, Seoul, or Milan, and you’ll notice something that statistics can’t fully convey. Compared to earlier, the hallways are now quieter. There are fewer families in the waiting areas.

The statistics support this: South Korea’s fertility rate recently dropped below 0.8 children per woman, Japan has been recording more deaths than births for years, and rural villages in Italy have been paying families cash to relocate and start a family. These are not isolated oddities. They are early dispatches from a demographic shift that is currently occurring in most of the developed world and well into the developing world, faster than most projections had predicted.

The concern was in the opposite direction for the majority of modern history. The 1968 book “The Population Bomb” by Paul Ehrlich foresaw catastrophic overpopulation, starvation for hundreds of millions of people, and a planet overtaken by its own human weight. For decades, this fear influenced academic discourse, foreign aid policy, and environmental movements.

As it turned out, it was significantly incorrect—not because there was no population growth, but rather because something else was going on concurrently. Women were choosing to have fewer children as they gained access to careers, education, and contraception. It turns out that the trajectory of the species changes when you give women real choices about their lives.

Approximately two-thirds of the world’s population lives in more than half of the countries with fertility rates below the replacement threshold of 2.1 children per woman. At 2.3, just above replacement, the global average is declining.

According to a University of Washington study that was published in the Lancet, the world’s population will peak at 9.7 billion people in 2064 before starting to decline. Expert opinion has changed quickly, as evidenced by the UN’s 80% probability of population peaking this century, up from just 30% ten years ago. The peak may occur earlier than even these updated estimates indicate. At least the direction appears to be clear.

Economically speaking, this is the point at which the discussion becomes awkward. In January 2025, McKinsey’s Global Institute published a thorough analysis that presented the numbers in an unsettlingly clear manner. Age structures are inverting; what once resembled a population pyramid with a wide base and a narrow top is gradually changing into something more akin to an obelisk, with the younger cohorts shrinking and the older ones growing. By 2050, the percentage of people in advanced economies and China who are of working age is predicted to drop from 67% to 59%.

Across these nations, GDP per capita growth may slow by an average of 0.4 percentage points per year, and in some, by as much as 0.8 percentage points. According to McKinsey, retirement systems may need to use up to 50% of labor income simply to cover the increasing disparity between seniors’ earnings and their consumption. That is an astounding figure. Somewhere, something will have to give.

Observing how governments react to this gives the impression that many of them comprehend the issue on an intellectual level but don’t quite think it will affect their tenure. Viktor Orbán of Hungary has pledged that women with four or more children will never again have to pay income tax. Iran eliminated contraceptives from state clinics and reversed its family planning initiatives. Sweden’s fertility rate increased by roughly 0.2 children per woman as a result of a comprehensive package of childcare subsidies, flexible work schedules, and generous parental leave.

The lead author of the Lancet study, Christopher Murray, has stated unequivocally that no combination of policies has successfully stopped the decline in fertility in a developed economy to date. Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore all used variations of the Swedish model with little success. It’s still unclear if any government has truly figured out how to significantly alter this figure or if declining fertility is just the result of people being free and under financial pressure to make sensible decisions about their families.

Sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates are still high and the population is still expanding, is the only area that is not affected by this narrative, at least not yet. Nigeria alone is expected to become one of the world’s largest nations by 2100, with a population of nearly 800 million. In the coming decades, Africa’s youthful labor force will play a significant role in the world’s labor supply and consumption, making the economic prosperity of developing African countries a shared concern. The way the world economy has traditionally viewed who propels growth and who depends on it has undergone a dramatic change.

The fundamental question that demographers have been debating for years is difficult to ignore: can economies based on the presumption of constant growth—more workers, consumers, and taxpayers—function coherently in a world where all those curves are bending in the opposite direction? To be honest, no one knows. The Black Death was the last major global population decline. The current change is not disastrous; rather, it is a result of prosperity, education, and choice that the growth-oriented economic systems were never intended to handle.