Global fertility divide

The world is entering a period of demographic divide that few policymakers are prepared to confront openly. Over the past seven decades, global fertility rates have fallen by more than half. Today, more than half of all countries—including every advanced economy, and a growing number of middle-income countries—have fertility rates below the replacement level.From Japan and Italy to the United States and the United Kingdom, ageing populations and shrinking workforces are becoming the defining economic challenge of the coming decades.
At the same time, parts of the Global South, including Bangladesh, face the opposite challenge: youthful populations, expanding labour forces, and a chronic shortage of productive domestic jobs. This growing demographic imbalance is no longer a distant forecast. It is already reshaping labour markets, fiscal sustainability, and growth prospects worldwide.
Yet instead of treating this imbalance as an opportunity for mutual gain, much of the developed world has chosen to politicise it.
Ageing economies, empty jobs: Declining fertility combined with longer life expectancy has sharply increased dependency ratios in advanced economies. Countries such as Japan, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom (UK) now have between one-fifth and one-quarter of their populations aged 65 or older. This places mounting pressure on pension systems, healthcare budgets, and public finances, while reducing the pool of working-age contributors.
The economic consequences are visible everywhere. Labour shortages have spread across both high-skill and essential service sectors: STEM and ICT; healthcare and social services; construction and skilled trades; food services; logistics; and transportation. Automation and artificial intelligence would improve productivity at the margin, but they cannot replace nurses, caregivers, electricians, plumbers, or teachers—jobs that remain stubbornly human.
Governments across the developed world are responding pragmatically to these shortages by investing in skills, increasing participation in STEM education, and improving the quality of education and training. Canada and Australia have expanded skills-based immigration while investing heavily in training and credential recognition. Germany and France have eased immigration rules for specific occupations. Japan and South Korea are cautiously increasing their imports of foreign labour while encouraging women and older citizens to remain in the workforce. Singapore balances a selective approach to importing foreign workers into high-value sectors like health care and tech with relentless upskilling and automation of local skills. The UK has responded with measures such as temporary visas for selected occupations, including farm workers and caregivers.
These measures acknowledge an inconvenient truth: without foreign workers, economic growth will slow, and fiscal pressures will intensify.
The political backlash—and its cost: Yet this economic realism collides with an increasingly hostile political climate. Immigration has become the central fault line of contemporary politics in many advanced economies. Cultural anxiety, identity politics, and populist rhetoric have transformed what should be a technocratic labour-market issue into a polarising moral battleground.
As Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff has argued in a recent Project Syndicate article, the result is a widening gap between economic fundamentals and policy choices. Ageing societies need workers, but politics pushes governments toward tighter borders and symbolic crackdowns. The irony is profound: policies designed to appear “tough” on immigration end up undermining long-term growth, innovation, and fiscal sustainability.
The United States (US) offers a vivid example. Historically, its openness to global talent has been one of its greatest economic strengths, fuelling entrepreneurship, productivity, and technological leadership. Yet repeated swings between permissive and punitive immigration regimes have created uncertainty that discourages even legal, high-skill migration. Recent research suggests that the long-term growth costs of restrictive immigration policies may exceed those of tariffs and trade wars.
The basic argument, however, is not that borders should be flung open indiscriminately. Instead, it is that managed, legal, and economically aligned migration offers some of the most significant untapped gains available to the global economy—if politics would allow it.
A missed opportunity for the Global South: For Bangladesh and much of the Global South, this global stalemate is deeply consequential. Youth unemployment, underemployment, and informality remain persistent challenges. Climate stress, urban congestion, and fiscal constraints further limit domestic economies’ capacity to absorb growing labour forces productively.
Migration is often treated as a sign that something has gone wrong—that people leave only because their countries have failed them. That view misses today’s reality. In a world where some countries are running out of workers while others have too many, moving labour across borders is not a failure. It is a practical and necessary development strategy.
When managed effectively, migration can serve as a powerful economic stabiliser. It can absorb surplus youth labour, reduce social and political pressures at home, and generate remittances that support household consumption, education, and productive investment. More importantly, when migration is deliberately linked to skills formation, it can trigger virtuous cycles of learning—facilitating knowledge transfer, exposure to new technologies, and gradual institutional upgrading in origin countries.
However, the terms of global labour mobility are changing. The window for large-scale, low-skill, low-wage migration is narrowing. Advanced economies are becoming increasingly selective, favouring workers with certified skills, language competence, and adaptability. The labour shortages they face are not simply quantitative; they are fundamentally qualitative.
From labour exporter to skills partner: For Bangladesh, the strategic implication is clear. The future of migration lies not in exporting large numbers of low-skill workers, but in becoming a reliable supplier of trained, healthy, and certified professionals in areas of global demand: nurses and caregivers, construction supervisors and technicians, logistics and transport workers, and ICT specialists.
This requires a decisive shift in policy priorities. Investment in vocational training, STEM education, healthcare skills, and internationally recognised certification must become central to the development strategy. Language proficiency, often neglected, needs to be treated as economic infrastructure. Migration governance must shift from unregulated private recruitment agencies to state-supported, transparent systems that protect workers while meeting destination-country standards.
Such an approach would serve both sides. Ageing societies would gain the workers they urgently need to sustain growth and care for their elderly. Youthful societies would gain employment, income, and human capital rather than frustration and instability.
When Economics Is Clear, but Politics Isn’t: The global immigration debate is frequently framed as a zero-sum cultural conflict. In reality, it reflects a failure of coordination in a world marked by sharp demographic imbalances. Restricting mobility does not reverse population ageing, nor does it generate employment in labour-surplus economies. Instead, it postpones adjustment—resulting in slower growth and labour shortages in advanced economies, underutilised human capital in developing countries, and heightened risks of economic and social instability.
For the Global South, for countries like Bangladesh, the choice is not between migration and development. The choice is between unplanned, low-value labour mobility and strategic, skills-based integration into the global labour market. For the Global North, the choice is equally stark: reconcile politics with demography—or accept a future of labour scarcity and economic stagnation. In the long run, walls cannot substitute for workers.

Dr M.G. Quibria , a development economist, held various leadership positions at the Asian Development Bank and ADB Institute. mgquibria.morgan@gmail.com. Dr Barkat-e-Khuda is a former professor and chairperson of the Department of Economics at the University of Dhaka. barkatek@yahoo.com