ART WOOLF

The average Vermont woman will have 1.6 babies over her lifetime. That's less than the number in nearly every other state and less than in most countries in the world.

Of course, no one has six-tenths of a baby, but when we're dealing with large numbers of women, and large numbers of babies, fractions and decimals do play a role.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that only women in New Hampshire and Rhode Island have fewer babies than Vermont women. The fertility rate for the U.S. as a whole is 1.9 babies per woman over her lifetime, so Vermont's fertility rate is about 15 percent below the U.S. average. By contrast, Utah, the state with the highest fertility rate, is 25 percent above the national average.

For a nation to have a long-term stable population the fertility rate needs to be 2.1, so if the U.S. fertility rate remains below 2.1, without immigration the U.S. population will eventually begin to decline.

Vermont's fertility is close to the level in many developed nations in the world—Europe, Japan, and Canada—but those, and Vermont's, are also among the lowest fertility rates in the world.

For the world as a whole, the average woman will have 3.2 babies over her lifetime. That's two-thirds what it was forty years ago, and that, in turn is a lot less than it has been throughout human history.

In the United States in the early 1800s, the average woman gave birth to seven or eight children (not all of whom lived). The average woman was pregnant or nursing from her early 20s through her early 40s. In most of the 19th century, the United States experienced the highest fertility rate ever recorded by any nation at any time in history.

By 1900, fertility had fallen significantly and American women had an average of 3.8 babies. That number continued falling through the mid-1940s, when it shot up during the baby boom. By 1957 it was again 3.8, before continually falling to today's level of 1.9.

That decline in births per woman is now being mirrored throughout most of the world. As economies develop, incomes rise, women get more education and birth rates fall. In the world's two largest nations, India and China, birth rates have fallen by more than 50 percent over the last four decades.

Many people still think of a world that's getting more and more populated, and it is. But according to the United Nations, the world's population is likely to stop increasing by the middle of this century.

Just about the only place where birth rates have not fallen is Africa, where the average woman still has five, six, or more babies. But even there, birth rates are likely to fall as the continent develops, public health improves, and women have more access to education. In South Africa, the richest nation in sub-Saharan Africa, the fertility rate has more than halved since 1970.

Turning back to the Green Mountain State, why is Vermont's birth rate so low? One reason is that Vermont has few Hispanics, who have a higher than average fertility rate. Another is that Vermont women are more highly educated than the national average, and fertility and education are negatively correlated. But these only explain a small part of the difference. We really don't know the full reasons.

We do know that Vermont's very low fertility rate is a contributing factor to the state's demographic stagnation. With only a small number of immigrants moving into Vermont and the number of Vermonters moving out exceeding the flatlanders moving in, Vermont's current population of 626,000 is not likely to change much in coming years.

Demographic stagnation and an aging population is a very real fact of life for Vermont. That's true for most of the developed world and will be happening world-wide during this century. It's never happened before in human history and Vermont appears to be on the cusp of that change.

Art Woolf is associate professor of economics at UVM and editor of The Vermont Economy Newsletter.