There are dozens of countries that intend to cope with below replacement level fertility rates by importing more workers – except there are not going to be enough immigrants to do that.
The world may be close to negative population growth. While a 2.1 fertility rate is the headline number, the actual value varies by country depending on infant and child mortality (especially).
A country with high child mortality needs a fertility rate greater than 2.1 to maintain a replacement level population. When this is taken into account, some countries that seem to have high fertility rates might not be growing their population – they have more babies, but too many die young. The effect is a country with, say, a 2.4 fertility rate can be in negative population growth.
For this reason, automation is going to play an ever-increasing role in our lives, to replace work previously done by people – because we no longer will have sufficient people.
