Why is there a negative growth rate of population in developed countries
Answers
At the extreme, other countries are experiencing negative population growth. Again, this means more deaths and emigration, or the leaving of a country, than births and immigration, or entering of a country. ... When a population loses too many members, voids are created.
Explanation:
There are various reasons that all compound to cause below replacement level birth rates in most of the Western world.
Obviously, you have the wide and cheap/free availability of birth control ranging from condoms to the pill to abortion. so anybody who doesn't want a child right now, doesn't have to have one. But this only explains the how.
As to why people choose to avoid having kids, my view is rising life expectancy combined with education. This makes people feel they have a longer time on this earth to achieve their goals, but it also means slower development of the newer generations. For example, people now work into their late 60’s and early 70’s. This causes a massive backlog in youth employment, because the elderly aren't dying off and they are continuing to hold on to jobs with ever decreasing productivity… on the flipside, increased availability of education has added to this problem by making it so most young people now finish their schooling in the early 20’s and wont hit the labour market until 22 or 23.
If you are in your mid 20’s just starting out, without assets or a secure job (as most young people are nowadays) and you are sufficiently educated and prone to taking personal responsibility (i.e. doing the right thing, studying for exams etc), you will not go ahead and just have a kid without the security to provide for it. Interestingly, there is actually an inverse correlation between the number of years of education you have and the number of kids you have - the more educated you are the fewer kids you have. At PhD level, fertility rates are something like 0.5 per female or lower. Its crazy unsustainable.
So if economic and societal circumstances push most people into their 30’s before they can have kids, they then get hit by the biological reality of massively decreased fertility for women at this age or older.
People will happily take these chances of having 1 kid because in developed countries the state is strong and people have confidence in relying on it to provide for them when they are old. Whereas previous generations and poor countries now,days know that the state is inherently unstable and can collapse at any moment so their children are their old age security.
Hope it helps you dear