Summary:
The factors that are going to shape the family landscape until 2030. A range of interrelated factors will be at play in changing the contours of family composition and functioning in the coming decades. These factors are population, union formation and dissolution, future household size, immigration, economic prospects, labor market and employment prospects, security and crime, and a sketch of the average family’s world to 2025/30. This section brings together an overview of a wide variety of long-term projections and forecasts in an effort to paint a broad-brush canvas of the range of influences shaping the environment for families over the coming years. It must be stressed however that they are projections and forecasts and that they will therefore inevitably turn out to be wrong, so great are the uncertainties surrounding even well-researched disciplines such as population projections. Nonetheless they provide a sense of the broad trends that are determining important features of family life as we move forward into the future.
a) Population
The last few decades have experienced social change on a remarkable scale. In particular there have been extraordinary gains in longevity in developed countries, with average life expectancy at birth rising from 66 years in 1950 to just over 76 years in 2007. Life expectancy at birth could continue to rise by at least a further 6 years by 2050, leading to a big increase in the number of people surviving to the ages of 80 and 90.This has had, and will continue to have, far-reaching implications for the composition of families, perhaps best grasped through a long-term historical perspective. In the United States, only one-in-five children born at the start of the 20th Century would have had any grandparent still living by the time they reached the age of 30. By contrast, nearly one in seven children born at the start of the 21st Century will have all four grandparents still alive by the age of 18, and by age 30 nearly one in eight will have at least one grandparent alive. At the other end of the spectrum, the last few decades have seen significant falls in fertility rates. Looking across developed countries as a whole, birth rates have declined sharply. In 1950, the total fertility rate (TFR), i.e. the average number of children being born per woman, was 2.8, but by 2007 the TFR had fallen to 1.6, leaving many OECD countries well below the fertility rate of 2.1 per woman needed to replace the population at a constant level (the so-called “replacement level”).
b) Union formation and dissolution
European countries and the United States shared a considerable marriage boom after the Second World War, where after general marriage rates declined – albeit less so in the US than in Europe. In some Northern European countries these rates have stabilized since the 1980s, while in the US they have continued to decline. Reasoned projections of future trends in marriage are few and far between. To the extent that the decline in general marriage rates is quite widespread, it would seem plausible to hypothesize that they will continue to fall in the years ahead. On the other hand, it is equally plausible that they could stabilize or even reverse, since inbuilt generational factors may come into play. For example, a US study of cohorts born in the 1950s and 1960s concludes that marriage will remain nearly universal for American women, so that general marriage rates may pick up again in the future once the effect of delaying marriage for educational purposes diminishes. The decline in the general marriage rate has been offset to some extent by the rise in non-marital cohabitation, whereby the two may be linked. In Scandinavia and some western European countries, cohabitation tends to have the character of an alternative or substitute for marriage, reflected in the increasing number of couples who remain together without marrying. In the United States, cohabitation tends to be more of a prelude to marriage. These contrasting trends make projections over several decades particularly hazardous. As concerns union dissolution, there is again an interesting contrast between European and US experience. During the 20Th Century, divorce rates were higher in the US than in many western European countries. But while the upward trend continued it Europe, it declined in the US and divorce rates there are now closer to those in European countries. The picture on cohabitation dissolution rates is quite mixed, too. Unsurprisingly perhaps, they tend to be higher than divorce rates. But looking across Europe as a whole, some countries have higher and some lower rates than in the US. Where there does appear to be a widely shared trend, is that the combined result of divorce and cohabitation dissolution is a significant increase in the instability of unions, borne out by research in the United States, Canada and some European countries. Nonetheless, this is a social phenomenon whose pattern remains largely unpredictable one or two decades ahead. Some countries have however ventured into this difficult terrain. For England and Wales, for example, latest (2003-based) marital status projections assume that current trends, which are pervasive across Western societies, are set to continue. These involve less and later marriage, more cohabitation and some increase in partnership breakdown/divorce, although with some slowing in the rates of increase of earlier decades. Increased breakdown and the number of births occurring outside marriage point to more single-parent families so that by 2026 the number of people living in lone parent households (mainly lone mothers) is expected to rise nearly five-fold. The trend will be fuelled by the rise in divorce and cohabitation, and the more complex arrangements such as reconstituted family households. Projections for Great Britain also indicate that cohabitation will become more common than marriage in the prime childbearing ages of 25-34.
c) Future household size
Unfortunately, household projections are few and far between. No international organization produces household projections for countries or regions of the world, as is done for population by for example the United Nations, IIASA, the World Bank, and the US Census Bureau. Instead it falls to the statistical offices of a few countries to generate their own projections for planning purposes in such domains as housing, household services, or support services for the elderly. The principal determinants of future household size are changes in population age structure (ageing momentum), fertility rates and rates of household formation and dissolution, and as has been seen in the preceding sections, all three are evolving unfavorably in relation to household formation. Hence, official projections are unanimous in expecting that average family size in the developed world will in future not exceed 1.85 or 1.9. This is reflected at individual country level. In Great Britain, one-person households are expected to increase to 2026 for all age groups, not least for the under 25s and the 25-34 group (rising to around 1.3 million households for the two age-groups together), so that average household size is expected to decrease from 2.34 in 2004 to 2.11 in 2026 and 2.09 in 2029. The Australian Bureau of Statistics also projects a quite steep decrease in average household size – from 2.6 (in 2001) to 2.2/2.3 in 2026. In Japan – average household size is set to fall from 2.56 in 2005 to 2.27 in 2030 as a result of deep-seated structural changes - one-person households up from 29.5% to 37.4%; couples with children down from 29.9% to 21.9%; single parent households up from 8.4% to 10.3%.
d) Immigration
Historically, immigration has been an important determinant of many a country’s national family profile, and given the prospect of continuing global migratory flows in the decades ahead, it will in all probability remain so. In 2006 and average of 9% of OECD populations were foreign-born. Among countries, however, there are significant differences, with shares of foreign-born ranging from well over 20% in Australia, Switzerland and Canada, to around 12-14% in the US, Germany, France, Austria, Belgium and Sweden, and a mere 2.4% in Turkey and 1.1% in Japan. Within the foreign-origin populations, the proportion of “non-Western” people varies considerably – in Europe, for example, it ranges from around 40% for Austria, Norway and Sweden to over 65% for Germany and Denmark, and 77% for England and Wales. The age structure of the foreign-origin populations, particularly those of non-Western origin, is relatively youthful. For example, looking at the OECD area as a whole, about 60% of Indian, Filipino and Moroccan immigrant populations are aged between 15 and 44 (i.e. not even counting children). With respect to birth rates, the fertility of foreign-origin populations in industrialized countries has tended to converge to the national average, and in some cases to drop below it. But only in a few cases is that process complete. For instance, total fertility rates among Indians in Great Britain and among Caribbean immigrant populations in the Netherlands have dropped to roughly national levels, while Muslim and African fertility remains quite high but seems to be on a downward trend. Chinese and East African Asians in Britain exhibit fertility levels below the national average, while total birth rates of women born in Pakistan and Bangladesh are way above the national norm (4.7 and 3.9 respectively) as are those of African immigrant populations in Britain and Sweden. Thus, while the picture is mixed, it does suggest that increased inflows of “acculturated” populations may serve to maintain or even boost fertility rates. It is against this background of relatively youthful and fertile immigrant populations that future migration flows to OECD countries attract particular interest for the purposes of this report, because they can be expected to exert a key influence on OECD populations.
e) Economic prospects
An important ingredient in the mix of factors that determine marriage or cohabitation patterns, household and family formation and fertility rates is the economic situation of the individual and the longer term economic outlook. In particular with respect to the so-called “fertility trap”, the economic story would seem to play an important role. It goes something like this. “Lower fertility leads to faster population ageing and thus to deeper cuts in the welfare state, less job creation, and an expectation of lower economic growth in the future; at the same time, aspirations for personal consumption are still on the rise owing to parental wealth and fewer siblings; and the match of high aspirations and pessimism about the economic future will result in even lower fertility. This assumed economic mechanism has the potential to create a continuing downward spiral toward lower fertility.” There can be little doubt that material aspirations of young people have been rising over recent decades as a consequence of increasing parental wealth, high consumption standards communicated by advertising, and possibly even smaller family size (so that youngsters have fewer siblings to share with).
f) Labor market and employment prospects
As documented in youth surveys around Europe, the expectations of young people entering the labor market today are not optimistic. Interestingly, this somewhat somber mood among young people is not borne out by broader macro trends. Take the European situation for example. Recent projections by the European Commission (2006) show that: Firstly, younger cohorts are declining and will continue to decline through to 2030 and 2050, suggesting less intense competition among young people for jobs. Secondly, although the working-age population will begin to decline from 2010 onwards, the total number of persons in work in the EU-25 will continue to increase until around 2017. Thirdly, more than two-thirds of this increase will be a result of higher numbers of women in work, older women being gradually replaced by better-educated younger women with greater involvement in working life. Similar trends can also be observed in other non-European OECD countries, including Japan and Korea. However, youth unemployment is high in many countries and there are fewer secure jobs notably for women. As Fagnani (Annex II) points out, precarious jobs have been developing quite rapidly in Europe and Asia, not only in the form of fixed-term contracts but also in the shape of temporary agency work and involuntary part-time work. In Japan, Korea, Germany and Spain, these forms of employment are quite widespread among women and especially among married women and single mothers. Indeed, in Japan nonstandard employment accounts for more than half of women’s total employment.
g) Security and crime
Although not a major factor in shaping family structures, crime levels and drug and alcohol abuse can contribute to the general sense of security, influencing in turn decisions on whether to have family and where to settle. Forecasts of crime levels even at national level are very hard to find, so any prospective thinking needs to be based on existing trends amplified by any meaningful social and economic future trends that can be found. Some internationally comparable crime statistics are available (from e.g. Interpol, UN, ICVS, EU ICS) though coverage is not complete and they remain, like crime statistics at national level, notoriously difficult to interpret. Nonetheless, for theft, robbery, sexual offences and assaults and threats (i.e. offences typically affecting the family), crime rates do on the whole seem to have declined over the last ten years or so in OECD countries.
h) A sketch of the average family’s world to 2025/30
Taken together, the various prospects outlined above offer a set of signposts to the kind of world in which young families in OECD countries could well be living 20-25 years from now. At risk of considerable generalization, their environment could look roughly as follows: Many more grey-haired people will be in their vicinity than is currently the case; They will find themselves with at least four and possibly even five generations in the family alive at the same time, though not all under the same roof; Young families themselves will tend to be small, interacting with other small families; many of them will be single-parent and cohabiting-couple households; More young people will be preparing for higher education, especially girls; Young families living in urban centers will find themselves interacting much more with families of different ethnicity or of mixed origin; this will be felt especially at school and college as the numbers and shares of such children increase, exposing all children to a much richer range of cultural values and points of view (some consensual, some conflicted ) in the classroom; The overall economic situation will not be conducive to expectations of higher incomes, with overall economic growth rates quite modest over the period in question; slow reform of pay-as-you-go social security systems will weigh heavily on young-people’s pay packets, just as energy, food and possibly housing costs will weigh heavily on family budgets; Competition for jobs among young people will not be as intense as today, given the smaller cohorts, but there will be an abundance of more precarious job openings, so that competition for the “quality” employment opportunities will remain fierce; Security will remain a concern for parents in many countries, with alcohol and drug abuse increasingly an established part of the scene.
Do you feel that these factors are truly important to how the family is going to be shaped for 2030?
Are there are any other important factors that should be considered for the future?
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