全球生育率下降，少子化危机何解？

ethan.wu

Think the Baby Bust Was Bad Before? Just Look at It Now.

全球生育率下降，少子化危机何解？

Peter Coy

彼得·科伊



The baby bust that we all know about has gotten worse in a way that isn’t yet widely understood.

我们都知道的婴儿出生率骤降以一种尚未被广泛理解的方式变得更糟。

Birthrates, which have been falling for decades, declined even more during the Covid pandemic. And they have continued to fall since, according to a report to clients by James Pomeroy, a global economist for HSBC, the London-based bank. It’s titled, “The Baby Bust Intensifies: How Bad Could It Get?” (Sorry, no link.)

几十年来一直下降的出生率在新冠疫情期间下降得更厉害了。根据总部位于伦敦的汇丰银行的全球经济学家詹姆斯·波默罗伊给客户的报告，自那以来，出生率持续下跌。该报告的标题是：《婴儿出生率下跌：会有多糟糕？》（抱歉，没有链接。）

Pomeroy didn’t wait for the official data collectors such as the United Nations to assemble data trickling in from national statistical agencies. He went out and collected the numbers from them himself. Some are provisional or don’t cover all the way through the end of 2023, and “some are produced from very interesting back corners of government statistics offices,” Pomeroy wrote to me in an email.

波默罗伊没有等待联合国等官方数据收集机构汇总各国统计机构的数据，而是亲自去收集数据。波默罗伊在给我的电子邮件中写道，有些数据不是最终数据，或者没有涵盖到2023年底的所有数据，“有些数据来自政府统计办公室非常有趣的角落。”

While the final numbers may come in marginally different, they’re unlikely to change the message of this chart below, which itself is slightly updated from the one that appeared in the bank’s report. In most of the countries for which Pomeroy managed to get data, the total number of births continued to fall steeply in 2023. The United States did better than most, with a decline of 1.9 percent. The Czech Republic, Ireland and Poland all experienced declines of 10 percent or more.

虽然最终数据可能略有不同，但它们不太可能改变下面这张图表所传达的信息，比起汇丰银行报告中的数据，该表略有更新。在波默罗伊设法获得数据的大多数国家，2023年的出生总数继续急剧下降。美国的表现好于大多数国家，下降了1.9%。捷克共和国、爱尔兰和波兰的降幅都在10%或以上。

To Pomeroy, the most “staggering” decline is the 8.1 percent drop in South Korea, because that nation already had the world’s lowest total fertility rate in 2022, at 0.78. (The total fertility rate is the number of children a woman would have over her lifetime if in each year of her life she experienced the birthrate that women of that age experience now. The total fertility rate required to keep a nation from shrinking over the long term in the absence of immigration is 2.1.)

对波默罗伊来说，最“惊人”的是韩国8.1%的降幅，因为该国在2022年的总和生育率已经是世界上最低的，为0.78。（总和生育率是指，假设一名女性一生中每年的生育率都与同期同龄女性的生育率相同，那么她一生中将会生育的孩子数量。在没有移民的情况下，保持一个国家长期不萎缩所需的总和生育率是2.1。）

Low fertility has become a national emergency in South Korea, where experts say that if the decline continues, the nation’s population could shrink by two-thirds by the end of the century. Korean newspapers are filled with stories about closing nursery schools, expanded baby bonuses and whether it will become necessary to conscript women into the armed forces to meet quotas.

在韩国，低生育率已经成为国家紧急状况，专家表示，如果生育率继续下降，到本世纪末，韩国人口可能会减少三分之二。韩国报纸上充斥着关闭幼儿园、扩大生育婴儿奖金，以及是否有必要征召女性参军以满足定额的报道。

If fertility in South Korea can fall so far, it’s “plausible,” Pomeroy said, to think that it might happen in other countries, including the United States, where the total fertility rate is still a bit above 1.6. The U.S. population is still growing slowly, mainly because of immigration.

波默罗伊说，如果韩国的生育率能下降到如此地步，那么认为其他国家也可能出现这种情况就是“合理的”，包括总生育率仍略高于1.6的美国。美国人口仍在缓慢增长，主要原因是移民。

What makes a baby bust so hard to fight is that its effects compound over the generations. Fewer births in one generation lead to fewer women in the next generation to give birth. A smaller population may put less stress on the environment, but an upside-down population pyramid leaves too few working young people to support the retired elderly.

婴儿出生率下跌之所以难以对抗，是因为它的影响会随着世代加剧。一代人生育的减少会导致下一代生育的女性人数减少。人口减少可能会减轻对环境的压力，但倒置的人口金字塔导致工作的年轻人太少，无法养活退休的老年人。

The politically preferred solution to a low birthrate is simply to raise the rate. But pronatalist policies such as bonuses for having babies, free child care and so on haven’t met expectations where they’ve been tried. If policymakers can’t get birthrates up, they will be left with an unappetizing set of choices: raise taxes, raise the retirement age, cut retirement and health care benefits for older adults or increase immigration.

从政治上讲，解决低出生率的最好办法就是提高出生率。但生育奖励、免费托儿等生育政策在试行后并未达到预期效果。如果政策制定者不能提高出生率，他们将面临一系列令人不快的选择：提高税收、提高退休年龄、削减老年人的退休和医疗福利，或者增加移民。

That last option, increasing immigration, has a lot going for it. It can benefit both the receiving nation and the sending nation. People who go abroad to work send remittances home. They may also bring back ideas for new businesses. The Philippines has a small but growing start-up culture that seems to have been energized by Filipinos who worked abroad, Pomeroy said.

最后一种选择，即增加移民，有很多有利因素。它对接受国和派遣国都有利。出国工作的人往家里汇款。他们还可能带回创办新企业的想法。波默罗伊说，菲律宾的创业文化规模虽小，但正在不断壮大，这种文化似乎是由在国外工作的菲律宾人激发起来的。

The challenge for rich nations with low birthrates is to integrate new arrivals both economically and socially. That requires the public’s support for investment in housing, education and other things immigrants need. In the United States, a nation of immigrants, support for immigration remains fairly strong despite the chaos on the southern border. But it’s weaker among older Americans, as this chart shows:

低出生率的富裕国家面临的挑战是如何让新移民从经济和社会层面融入。这需要公众支持在住房、教育和移民需要的其他方面进行投资。在美国这个移民国家，尽管南部边境出现混乱，但对移民的支持仍然相当强烈。但在美国老年人中，这种支持相对较弱，如下图所示：

Pomeroy views that chart as potentially good news. If today’s young people remain as pro-immigration when they get old as they are now – not a certain thing – then the United States (and perhaps other rich nations) will become increasingly receptive to newcomers, which would ameliorate the problems caused by declining birthrates.

波默罗伊认为这张图表可能是个好消息。如果今天的年轻人在年老以后仍然像现在这样支持移民——这不是肯定的事情——那么美国（也许还有其他富裕国家）将越来越容易接受新移民，这将改善出生率下降造成的问题。

I don’t want to play down what a mess immigration is right now. More needs to be done to stop unauthorized entry and bring the processing of would-be immigrants under control. But more legal immigration, if permitted, would relieve the shortages of people to fill low-wage jobs in agriculture, food service, construction and personal care, Giovanni Peri, director of the Global Migration Center at the University of California, Davis, told me. (I support restructuring such jobs to make them more productive and higher-paying, but even then, they would be likely to appeal mostly to immigrants from lower-income nations.)

我不想淡化目前移民问题的混乱程度。我们需要做更多的工作来阻止未经许可的入境，并控制对潜在移民的处理。但加州大学戴维斯分校全球移民中心主任乔瓦尼·佩里告诉我，如果允许更多的合法移民，将缓解农业、食品服务、建筑和个人护理等低薪工作岗位人手短缺的问题。（我支持对这类工作进行重组，以提高它们的生产率和薪酬，但即便如此，它们也可能主要吸引来自低收入国家的移民。）

A generation from now, if current trends continue, people may look back at 2024 and wonder why Americans were trying so hard to keep people out instead of pleading with them to come in.

如果目前的趋势继续下去，一代人之后，当人们回顾2024年的时候，可能会想知道为什么美国人如此努力地把人们拒之门外，而不是恳求他们进来。