The phenomena of developing countries having low & very low fertility rates is really something. It’s also a very new one. Some examples include Costa Rica (TFR ~1.2), Sri Lanka (sub 1.5), Thailand (sub 1.0), Colombia (sub 1.45), Cuba (~1.5), Ecuador (~1.6), & Brazil (~1.5).

While developed countries face many of the same challenges of low fertility rates (rising pension aged population with less young people to pay taxes and work being amongst the most notable) they also have the resources to deal with many of them. The developing world does not.

🇹🇭👶Births in Thailand for the first 10 months of 2024 are in and they are down 10.7%! Looks like ~480,000 births for the year. Lowest ever recorded and less than half the 1 million plus births seen from 1963-1983. TFR to almost certainly be 0.98 or below for 2024.

More targeted natalism that provides dramatically greater incentives for third & higher order children will yield greater benefits than most nations current policy of simply handing out money for all new births (which simply provides resources to parents having children anyway).

Seattle/King County has a TFR around the same level as Italy, Los Angeles has approximately the same TFR as Germany,San Francisco the same TFR as China, and Boston roughly similar TFR to Spain. So many dense urban areas of the U.S. have similar TFRs to the nationwide averages of many EU countries. Wild.

Suburban & urban counties will continue deviate more and more in terms of TFR. The commuter suburbs of the dense urban areas and those areas even further out will have much higher TFR. You can already see it in spread out cities like Dallas which are still close to replacement.

CDC Wonder gives the following figures:
King Cty (Seattle) 1.26
Los Angeles Cty 1.35
Suffolk Cty (Boston) 1.16
San Francisco 1.06
New York City 1.47
Dallas Cty 1.87

https://x.com/birthgauge/status/1820900807912411554