World: The South Korean government will pay 540 US dollars monthly to a woman who has a baby till the baby turns one year old.
South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world, with a woman most likely to have not one but 0.8 babies in her lifetime. Eight out of ten South Korean women agree to have a child.
For a population to remain constant, a woman must have two children at least – a replacement for herself and her spouse. The demographic standard is 2.1, the 0.1 on top being the margin for incidents of losses.
Prosperous countries are struggling with fertility, mostly out of choice. The richer people get, the less they want kids.
The United States has a fertility figure of 1.6, similar to the UK and Germany at 1.5; while Japan stands at 1.3, Italy is 1.2. Anything less than 2.1 means the nation has scheduled a date with extinction.
Poor counties are eager to make babies, as a general rule. Nigeria is ahead at 5.1, bettered by Burundi at 5.2; Mozambique is 4.7; and over there in Ghana, they tick 3.7. India has stabilized at 2.8, whole China battles at 1.7.
This is certain that entire small towns have been wound down in Japan, the homes desolate and abandoned due to population shrinkage. In Italy, efforts are ongoing to sell houses for a dollar apiece to attract settlers.
Germany recruits 500,000 skilled workers yearly, and the country encourages women to keep their pregnancies like the future of the country that it is.
The pressures are killing the baby factories too. Lagos is choking, jobs are rare, pollution is the rule, and all roads lead abroad. Nigerian doctors have nearly all fled, and one might say that most of the people who can afford it spend a lot more time outside the country than within. The whole country is poked with crimes mainly stemming from an inability to feed millions of gaping mouths.
These are the immediate practical implications, but the details are much more subtle, and the overall effects will have impacts of historic proportions.
Emigration causes people and cultures to mix, and when they do, a lot of things are thrown up. The Americans are addressing their issues frankly, admitting that their majority Caucasian race is heading for minority status.
One of their solutions is outright acculturation. They intend to indict immigrants into their values and cultures so that even if the colour of the nation’s skin is altered, its values will remain mostly in place. The minorities of Asians, Latinos and Blacks are presently the majority in the United States – by birth statistics. With the fertility rate of Mexico standing at 2.0 and Brazil at 1.7, it does seem the United States will actually become more Asian than Latino, with blacks being a significant minority.
Generally, therefore, if a person observes emigration from poorer to richer county, a trend has come to stay. All flights will be heading northwards in the years to come because there is a real osmosis, a true diffusion gradient across the two poles. The foreign lands are calling and tugging, and the homeland is pushing and expelling.
