Smartphones and weaker relationships linked to falling global birth rates

Smartphones and weaker face-to-face relationships could be contributing to plunging birth rates worldwide, particularly among young people, as global fertility is declining at a record pace, the Financial Times has reported, citing researchers and demographic data.

An analysis spanning population records and Google search data found that birth rates declined sharply across multiple countries following the widespread adoption of smartphones, regardless of earlier demographic trends, the outlet wrote on Saturday.

The FT cited Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a researcher on demographic change, who described falling fertility as “the big question of our time.” He argued that many of today’s economic and social problems were “downstream” from collapsing birth rates.

Researchers are increasingly linking heavy smartphone and social media use as well as weaker face-to-face relationships to declining fertility in countries around the world, including the US, UK, Brazil and South Korea, according to the report.

The FT cited a recent paper by Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso-Boedo of the University of Cincinnati examining birth rates during the rollout of 4G mobile networks in the US and UK.

The researchers argued that smartphones changed how young people spend time together and sharply reduced in-person socializing. Birth rates among teenagers and young adults in the US, UK and Australia were broadly stable in the early 2000s before beginning to fall after 2007, when the devices became widely adopted.

Similar trends had been recorded across the world, the outlet said. France and Poland saw comparable declines from 2009, followed by Mexico, Morocco and Indonesia in around 2012, while Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal recorded steep drops between 2013 and 2015.

According to a Eurostat report published last month, the EU’s population is projected to shrink by 11%, or about 53 million people, over the next 75 years. The region’s population is expected to peak at 453 million in 2029 before falling below 400 million by the end of the century as fertility rates decline to around 1.3 children per woman.

As part of efforts to rebuild social connections, Russian policymakers in 2024 introduced restrictions banning students from using mobile phones in schools, with exceptions allowed only for emergencies.