Something unusual is happening across large swaths of the world. Maternity wards are quieter than they’ve ever been. Villages are emptying not from disaster or plague, but from a slow, structural unwinding of the conditions that once made having children a natural default. Countries need a total fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman to sustain long-term generational replacement of the population. Dozens are now falling far short of that threshold, some by a staggering margin.
Roughly 71% of the global population now lives in countries with fertility rates below replacement level, marking a major demographic shift as many of the world’s largest economies transition from population growth to long-term decline. The nine countries below aren’t just experiencing a dip. They’re facing the kind of numbers that, left unaddressed, reshape societies across generations.
1. South Korea: The Most Extreme Case on the Planet
In 2025, the fertility rate in South Korea was estimated at 0.68 children per woman, making it the lowest fertility rate worldwide. To put that into context, a rate of 2.1 is needed just to hold steady. South Korea sits at less than a third of that. Politicians have declared the situation a “national emergency,” with governments across the last 20 years spending enormous sums on incentives, but a combination of labor market inequality, a family-unfriendly work culture, the high costs of raising children, widespread pessimism, and young people’s lack of confidence in the future are considered major drivers of falling marriage and fertility rates.
South Korean authorities launched a flurry of initiatives in 2025 aimed at reversing the country’s demographic collapse, but population figures have declined for four consecutive years, and despite pouring nearly $300 billion into pro-natalist policies since 2006, the number of births continued to fall. A shrinking population could lead to a permanent recession by the 2040s, according to the Bank of Korea. Even a modest recent uptick in births has been attributed to a temporary demographic echo, not a true reversal.
2. Japan: A Nation Watching Itself Shrink in Real Time
Japan’s fertility rate has plummeted from 3.6 in 1950 to 1.2 in 2025, and according to government data, the number of births reached 686,061 in 2024, a decline of 5.7 percent from the previous year. That figure is a number that, given Japan’s population size, represents a structural crisis. If current trends continue, Japan’s population of around 124 million is set to fall to 87 million by 2070, when 40 percent of the population will be 65 or over.
Japan’s population is projected to lose 18.7 million people between 2024 and 2050, shrinking from 123.8 million to 105.1 million, a 15.1% decline. This has rung alarm bells in several arenas including the economy and national security, with successive governments publicly acknowledging the issue as an existential crisis and making attempts to stem the decline through expanding childcare allowances and lowering medical expenses related to pregnancy and childcare. The results have been modest at best.
3. Ukraine: War Compounding Decades of Demographic Weakness
Between 2000 and 2025, Ukraine’s population shrank by 32.5%, the worst indicator among the 183 countries analyzed. The International Monetary Fund estimates that by 2026, the country’s population will have shrunk to around 33.3 million, down from over 41 million in 2021, with key factors including a high mortality rate nearly three times higher than the birth rate, losses due to hostilities, and the emigration of over 6 million people abroad.
After four years of full-scale war, Ukraine faces a demographic crisis in which the death rate in 2025 outpaced the birth rate by nearly 3 to 1, with millions having fled the country for safety and those who remain often hesitant amid uncertainty and trauma to have children. According to a March 2025 study by Ukraine’s Center for Economic Strategy, only 43 percent of Ukrainian refugees worldwide plan to return, down from 74 percent just two years earlier. That declining intent to return may prove the most lasting wound.
4. Bulgaria: Europe’s Quiet Depopulation Emergency
Data from censuses in Bulgaria show that the country’s population has decreased from nearly 8.95 million people in 1985 to 6.44 million at the end of 2024, meaning that over forty years the population has decreased by nearly 30%. In 2023, 62,000 Bulgarians were born, compared to 155,000 in 1950, and the most pessimistic long-term projections indicate that Bulgaria’s population could diminish to just 3.5 million by 2100 if negative growth rates persist.
The greatest challenge Bulgaria will face in the coming decades is addressing persistent depopulation, a crisis that has worsened for years as the population has steadily declined over three decades. Bulgarian society has one of the lowest average life expectancies in the EU and suffers from a significant imbalance between younger and older age groups, challenges further worsened by the ongoing emigration of economically active Bulgarians. Rural areas are perhaps the starkest example, with nearly 200 villages recording zero inhabitants by the end of 2024.
5. Latvia: One Fifth of the Nation Already Gone
Latvia is expecting a 21.05% population loss between 2024 and 2050, and has already lost about one-fifth of its population since joining the European Union in May 2004, a loss caused by economic migration and low birth rates. The pattern became self-reinforcing: once young, educated workers leave, fewer children are born domestically, and the remaining population ages faster. Latvia is among the central and eastern European countries with fertility rates between 1.2 and 1.4, and these nations struggle with low population growth rates with less immigration to mitigate declining birth rates than in Western European countries.
Latvia ranks third among countries with the highest projected population drop by 2050, with a projected 21.6% decline for the period from 2020 to 2050. The demographics of Latvia’s remaining population are heavily skewed toward the elderly, which creates a compounding fiscal burden on healthcare and pension systems that depend on a shrinking base of working-age contributors. The country’s story is a preview of what larger Eastern European states may face within a generation.
6. Moldova: The Fastest Depopulating Country This Century
Moldova, the fastest-depopulating country this century, has seen its population fall by roughly 1 percent annually since 2000. Moldova lost 1 million people in population between 2020 and 2024, a drop of 25%, and the country’s population is projected to further decline by 20% from 2024 to 2050, expected to fall by 600,000 from 3 million to 2.4 million.
Poverty and corruption in Moldova have pushed highly-skilled, young workers out of the country, and the aging population has been plagued by poor living standards and high mortality rates. There’s a cruel irony at work here: the people most capable of driving economic recovery and raising families are exactly the ones who have the most incentive to leave. What remains is an increasingly older, more vulnerable population dependent on remittances from abroad.
7. Lithuania: Rural Communities Disappearing Generation by Generation
Lithuania’s fertility rate has dropped from 2.7 in 1950 to 1.2 in 2025, and while more than 30,000 children were born in the nation in 2015, almost 11,000 fewer births were recorded in 2024. Its current population stands at 2.8 million people, with more than 20 percent of residents above retirement age. The district of Rokiskis is particularly notable, where deaths outnumber births five to one, and marriage and divorce rates are nearly identical, a trend attributed to a combination of financial pressures, low wages, and depopulation in rural areas.
Individuals have also cited fear of war as a factor in not having children, alongside economic pressures such as high living and housing costs, social shifts including women pursuing careers and having children later, and demographic factors like an aging population, all combining to produce Lithuania’s substantially smaller fertility rates. Lithuania follows Bulgaria with a projected 22.1% population decline for the period from 2020 to 2050. Some of Lithuania’s smallest municipalities are now functionally beyond recovery without significant migration.
8. Italy: The “Demographic Winter” in Western Europe
Italy’s fertility rate has dropped from 2.5 in 1950 to 1.2 in 2025, so low that researchers have coined it a “demographic winter.” For the first time, in 2023, the number of births in a year fell below 400,000, and the number of deaths in Italy now exceeds births at a ratio of 12 deaths for every seven births. Since the economic crisis of 2008, the birth rate in Italy has been declining even despite plans to provide monthly payments to parents per child born.
Italy’s population is projected to shrink by about 12.5% from 2024 to 2050, reducing the current population of 59.3 million to 51.9 million, with births at an all-time low since the unification of Italy and young people leaving for other European countries for job opportunities. The pension system is under particularly severe strain. With fewer workers supporting a growing retiree population, the fiscal math becomes increasingly difficult to sustain without either major immigration or radical restructuring of entitlements.
9. China: The Demographic Consequences of Decades of Policy
China’s fertility rate rose slightly to 1.2 births per woman in 2024, a modest uptick that many demographers attribute to the end of strict pandemic lockdowns, but China counted half as many births in that year as in 2016, the year it ended its decades-old One Child Policy. Today, China’s estimated fertility rate is among the lowest globally at 1.0 births per woman. A nation of 1.4 billion cannot insulate itself from the structural forces it took decades to set in motion.
Population loss in the coming quarter century will be largest in China, with a projected drop of 155.8 million people. According to the UN, China’s population may already have peaked in around 2022, at 1.4 billion. The speed of that reversal has caught many analysts off guard. What took other countries generations to experience, China compressed into a few decades, and the country is now navigating the consequences of that compression with limited time and difficult trade-offs.
What These Nine Countries Share
Low fertility feeds a related phenomenon: population aging, which amplifies the economic, social, and political challenges facing countries with shrinking populations. Between 2025 and 2050, the share of population ages 65 and older in countries experiencing population declines will almost double from 17.3 percent to 30.9 percent. That shift places enormous pressure on healthcare, pensions, and labor markets simultaneously. It isn’t one problem, it’s three or four arriving at once.
Social policies to improve birth rates such as enhanced parental leave, free childcare, financial incentives, and extra employment rights may provide a small boost to fertility rates, but most countries will remain below replacement levels. Once nearly every country’s population is shrinking, reliance on open immigration will become necessary to sustain economic growth. Authors of major research efforts warn that national governments must plan for emerging threats to economies, food security, health, the environment, and geopolitical security brought on by these demographic changes that are set to transform the way we live.
The Broader Global Picture
Over the coming quarter century, 38 nations of more than 1 million people each will probably experience population declines, up from 21 in the past 25 years. The nine countries featured here represent the leading edge of a trend that shows no sign of reversing on its own. Demographers generally expect that the global population will peak in the next 30 to 60 years and then contract, which would be the first such decline since the Black Death in the 1300s.
The global total fertility rate has plummeted from 5 in 1950 to 2.25 in 2024, and it is projected to hit 2.1 by the late 2040s or even sooner per some estimates. The conversation about demographic collapse is no longer hypothetical or distant. For the countries on this list, it is already happening, measurable in empty classrooms, understaffed hospitals, and villages that exist only on old maps.
