Western countries have lower rates than Japan when you exclude for native birth rates. Western countries get a big boost in birth rate when you account for non-natives having population booms.
The birth rates in Western countries have been plummeting for the last 40 years. In fact, birth rates globally are declining almost everywhere except in countries that are still too poor to provide things like welfare. The data does not support your position.
We still have a birth rate that is too high. It will be a long long time before we need to work on raising the birth rate and the problem isn't that complex.
Except that birth rates are not just not increasing in the developed world but are below the replacement rate for many countries, such as Japan and Russia.
Why do people STILL think it's an unsolved problem? The birthrate among the native born in the West and the Far East are almost universally below the replacement rate. Education and urbanization/development do it.
The world overall might have too high a birth rate but almost all Western countries have a birth rate below the replacement level of 2.1 (e.g. US, UK, AUS all at 1.7 [0] and falling [1]).
Unless you make up this difference with immigration, you have a declining population, which creates all sorts of short term issues.
Given that western countries have become increasingly hostile to immigration, especially from developing countries, trying to increase birth rate in western countries is a reasonable thing to explore imo.
With the exception of Israel & Ireland, which are the only two western countries to have a positive native birth rate (avg >2.2 births/woman - supposedly 2.2 is the magic number that keeps a population size stable).
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