TOKYO >> In 1989, Japan seemed to be an unstoppable economic superpower. Its companies were overtaking competitors and gobbling up American icons like Rockefeller Center. But inside the country, the government had identified a looming, slow-motion crisis: The fertility rate had fallen to a record low. Policymakers called it the “1.57 shock,” citing the projected average number of children that women would have over their childbearing years.

If births continued to decline, they warned, the consequences would be disastrous. Taxes would rise or social security coffers would shrink. Japanese children would lack sufficient peer interaction. Society would lose its vitality as the supply of young workers dwindled. It was time to act.

Starting in the 1990s, Japan began rolling out policies and pronouncements designed to spur people to have more babies. The government required employers to offer child care leave of up to a year, opened more subsidized day care slots, exhorted men to do housework and take paternity leave, and called on companies to shorten work hours. In 1992, the government started paying direct cash allowances for having even one child (earlier, they had started with the third child), and bimonthly payments for all children were later introduced.

None of this has worked. Last year, Japan’s fertility rate stood at 1.2. In Tokyo, the rate is now less than one. The number of babies born in Japan last year fell to the lowest level since the government started collecting statistics in 1899.

Now the rest of the developed world is looking more and more like Japan. According to a report issued in 2019 by the United Nations Population Fund, half of the world’s population lives in countries where the fertility rate has fallen below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 births per woman.

Why should countries care about shrinking populations at a time of climate change, increasing risk of nuclear catastrophe and the prospect of artificial intelligence taking over jobs? At a global level, there is no shortage of people. But drastically low birth rates can lead to problems in individual countries.

Tomáš Sobotka, one of the authors of the U.N. report and a deputy director at the Vienna Institute of Demography, does a back-of-the-envelope calculation to illustrate the point: In South Korea, which has the lowest birth rate in the world at 0.72 children per woman, just over 1 million babies were born in 1970. Last year, 230,000 were. It’s obviously too simple to say that each person born in 2023 will, in their prime working years, have to support four retired people. But in the absence of large-scale immigration, the matter will be “extremely difficult to organize and deal with for Korean society,” said Sobotka.

Similar concerns arise from Italy to the United States: working-age populations outnumbered by the elderly; towns emptying out; important jobs unfilled; business innovation faltering. Immigration could be a straightforward antidote, but in many of the countries with declining birth rates, accepting large numbers of immigrants has become politically toxic.

Across Europe, East Asia and North America, many governments are, like Japan, introducing measures like paid parental leave, child care subsidies and direct cash transfers. According to the U.N., the number of countries deliberately targeting birth rates rose from 19 in 1986 to 55 by 2015.

“The policies would need to be very, very coercive to push people to change their preferences,” Sobotka said. “Or to have kids they didn’t want or plan to have.”

The Great Baby Bust

There’s plenty of evidence that governments can change fertility rates, but generally in one direction: down.

In East Asia, many of the countries that now have exceedingly low fertility initially imposed it on themselves. For more than three decades, China enforced a one-child policy. After World War II, Japan encouraged the wide use of contraception and decriminalized abortion in an effort to shrink the population. Likewise, in South Korea, the government legalized abortion in the early 1970s and discouraged families from having more than two children.

In Europe and the United States, fertility rates declined as more women entered the workforce and the influence of religion — particularly Catholicism — receded. Young people, who started to leave the communities where they were raised, pursue careers and build networks that normalized postponing marriage, had fewer children as they started childbearing later.

Declining infant mortality rates reduced the need to have many children. As economies transitioned away from predominantly agricultural or family-owned businesses that required offspring to run, people focused on leisure and other aspirations. Undergirding it all was the rise of birth control, which meant women could determine whether and when they got pregnant.

The impediments to having multiple children have also grown. Housing costs are ballooning and the gig economy has made young people worry about their own — and their potential offspring’s — financial security. The cost of educating children and preparing them for a more competitive and inequitable job market keeps increasing.

As families have fewer children, they invest more in those they have. Parents in China, Japan and South Korea compete to enroll their children in the best schools and pay for rigorous tutoring from a very young age. Some of those practices have become familiar in the United States, too. In August, Vivek H. Murthy, the surgeon general, issued an advisory to call attention to rising levels of stress and mental health concerns among American parents.

Work and home

Despite changes in family and work life, traditional ideas about who should take care of children — women, of course — have proved resistant to policy prescriptions. “Cultural expectations are designed to fit a way of living that doesn’t exist anymore,” said Matthias Doepke, an economist at the London School of Economics. “That is the root cause of these extremely low fertility rates that we have in rich countries.”

In Japan, a demanding work culture that originated in an era when many women stayed home makes it difficult to balance career and family. More than in the West, Japanese mothers, even those with careers, take care of the majority of child care and housework.

Some governments on the other side of the world have tried to address these kinds of inequalities. Scandinavian countries have enacted policies to shift some of the burden onto men in the hope that they can support bigger families.

In 1995, Sweden introduced what came to be known as the “daddy month,” a month of parental leave given to the spouse — usually the father — who had not already taken leave after the birth of a child. With the addition of second and third months in subsequent years, more fathers took paternity leave. “That has created a change in cultural expectations on what it means to be a good father,” said Ylva Moberg, a researcher in economics and sociology at Stockholm University.

Yet fertility rates in Sweden have not increased. Economists say it’s not clear that that means the policy has failed, given that Sweden’s rates are higher than those in East Asia. “The problem for economists is that even if the fertility rates haven’t gone up, they could have gone down more,” said Anna Raute, an associate professor of economics at Queen Mary University of London.

Marriage down, too

In Japan, policymakers are trying a new gambit: promoting weddings. Last year, fewer than 500,000 couples got married in Japan, the lowest number since 1933, despite polls showing that most single men and women would like to do so. One obstacle is that many young adults live with their parents — close to 40% of people ages 20 to 39, according to data from 2016, the latest year for which it is available.

Japanese politicians have also talked about the importance of raising wages, and some economists say the government should support corporate social activities that could lead to relationships. LGBTQ+ advocates argue that Japan should legalize same-sex marriage and help such couples have children.

In China, intrusive efforts by the authoritarian government to encourage childbearing have generated a backlash. In democratic countries, policies with a whiff of a mandate will likely engender fierce opposition, too.

Influencing those choices may be beyond the reach of traditional government policy. For most people in affluent countries, having children is deeply personal. Sometimes it’s also about luck. “Policies cannot find you the best possible partner you dreamed of at the right time,” Sobotka pointed out.