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Declining populations：Incredible shrinking countries During the second half of the 20th century, the global population explosion was the big demographic bogey. Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank in the 1970s, compared the threat of unmanageable population pressures with the danger of nuclear war. Now that worry has evaporated, and this century is spooking itself with the opposite fear: the onset of demographic decline. The shrinkage of Russia and eastern Europe is familiar, though not perhaps the scale of it: Russias population is expected to fall by 22% between 2005 and 2050, Ukraines by a staggering 43%. Now the phenomenon is creeping into the rich world: Japan has started to shrink and others, such as Italy and Germany, will soon follow. Even Chinas population will be declining by the early 2030s, according to the UN, which projects that by 2050 populations will be lower than they are today in 50 countries. Demographic decline worries people because it is believed to go hand in hand with economic decline. At the extremes it may well be the result of economic factors: pessimism may depress the birth rate and push up rates of suicide and alcoholism. But, in the main, demographic decline is the consequence of the low fertility that generally goes with growing prosperity. In Japan, for instance, birth rates fell below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman in the mid 1970s and have been particularly low in the past 15 years. | 
