The consequences of both too many and too few babies show up in dependency ratios - the young and old dependent on those of working age. A higher ratio of young dependants usually correlates with increased poverty. China currently has a low overall ratio of around 38 percent, but this is set to rise to 45 percent by 2030. Thailand is roughly similar. Both nations already have almost static working-age populations. At the other end of the scale, the Philippines dependency ratio is 63 percent - assuming a gradual decline in fertility that would still be 55 percent by 2030.
If there is a middle way between the baby boom and baby bust, it's provided by Indonesia, which has seen a gradual fall in fertility, now around the long-term stabilization level. Its total population should stop growing in about 30 years.
Projections of median age reveal the challenges ahead. By 2030 the median age will be just 22 in the Philippines, half that of South Korea, 47; China's will be 43 while Indonesia will be at 35 - the same as China and Thailand today. Thus while today's problem is the high level of poverty in the Philippines due to high fertility, tomorrow's problem will be avoiding a decline in living standards in countries with aging populations and declining workforces.
East Asia falls behind Western Europe in fertility rates despite government exhortations in Japan, Korea and Singapore, even some financial inducements to having children. There appears to be no easy answer, but the experience of north European countries plus Australia and New Zealand may provide a guide. France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and all of Scandinavia and the antipodean countries have rates of 1.9 and above, yet all show high female participation in the workforce - not as high as China's, but higher than Japan and Korea - and strong gender equality laws and practices.
They have in varying degrees job protection and generous leave for pregnant and nursing mothers, government funding of nursery schools, direct child support payments and other measures to reduce the economic opportunity costs of childbearing. They see this as investment in the future workforce, not just welfare cost.
In most of East Asia not only are the opportunity costs of children high, but there's reluctance on the part of many employed and well educated women to marry and risk submission to male assumptions of superiority. Countries in the West with high fertility rates also have high rates of birth out of wedlock. Women can choose to have babies without choosing a permanent partner. That is not yet socially acceptable in most of East Asia - except, ironically, in the Philippines where some 20 percent of births are out of wedlock, thanks in part to the Catholic Church's opposition to contraception and a ban on abortions.
All in all, something must give in these Asia's low-fertility societies if the Catholic bishops are not to be proved partly right on one aspect of the contraception debate. Demographic changes are unpredictable, and fertility may recover without government help or social change. But don't count on it.
