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edyong | August 5, 2009You wouldn't think it to look at our skyrocketing global population, but many parts of the world are experiencing serious falls in fertility. A country's fertility rate is the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime. In most developed countries, it needs to be 2.1 or higher if the number of newborns is to compensate for citizens who die. In developing countries, where death is a more frequent visitor, this replacement threshold is even higher.
The problem is that declining fertility is intimately linked with a country's economic and social development. As a result, more…