Indonesia’s Fertility Rate Dilemma. NewsWire

NewsWire: 3/24/21

• Indonesia’s government wants to lower the fertility rate, but is that a good idea? Op-ed writer Daniel Moss warns that the country risks following in the footsteps of other East Asian nations that are now struggling with rock-bottom fertility rates. (Bloomberg)
• NH: Since the late 1960s, Indonesia has seen its fertility rate decline by more than 50%, from 5.6 to around 2.28. The decline has largely stemmed from a successful family planning program and increased contraceptive use, along with massive improvements in basic education for girls.
• The TFR dropped steeply throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. By the late ‘90s, the decline began slowing down. President Joko Widodo recently announced that he wants to reduce the country’s TFR to 2.1 by 2025 to stabilize population growth. So he intends to ramp up family planning efforts again.
• It’s not hard to see why. Indonesia is the world’s fourth-most populous country. Most of its residents live on the island of Java, which has roughly 20 million more residents than Japan but is only about the size of Mississippi. The crowding in Jakarta is so dire that the government has vowed to relocate the capital to another island.
• The writer of this piece, Daniel Moss, warns Jokowi to be careful. Other East Asian nations that pushed family planning as a development strategy are now desperate to bring their birthrates back up. (See “South Korea's Falling Fertility Keeps Breaking Records,” “Registered Births in China Tumbled 15% in 2020,” “Does Taiwan Have More Pets Than Kids?”, “Singapore Offers New Baby Bonus.”) He suggests that rising living standards will be enough to bring down fertility.
• But is this really true for Indonesia? Maybe not.
• Unlike the other countries Moss cites, the vast majority (87%) of Indonesia’s population is Muslim. Muslim women have higher fertility rates than the adherents of any other religion--or non-religion, for that matter. While fertility rates throughout the Muslim world have fallen significantly over the past two decades, they’re still much higher, on average, than in non-Muslim countries. In 2010-15, the fertility rate across all 49 Muslim-majority countries was about 2.9.
• Why is this the case? In its theology, Islam isn’t any more natalist than, say, Christianity. The difference is just as likely the result of greater poverty, a weaker civic culture, poorer social services, and less education and fewer opportunities for women.
• Indonesia’s religious profile, of course, does not mean that it is insulated from the forces that have driven neighboring countries’ TFRs below replacement rates. But instead of nations like China or South Korea, a better cautionary tale for Indonesia would be Iran: another Muslim-majority country where urbanization and strict family planning policies more than halved the TFR in just two decades. (See “Iran Ponders Its Low Birth Rate.”)
• Iran shows that it’s possible, as Moss warns, that in time Indonesia might end up with a birthrate lower than it wants. But that prospect, Jokowi's experts believe, is many years away. Right now, like the Philippines (see “The Philippines Struggles with a Baby Boom”), the country’s most pressing fertility concern is the prospect of an unintended post-pandemic baby boom.