Here’s a noteworthy piece from The Middle East Times on the swiftly falling fertility rates across most of the Arab world. Some countries, it notes, including Bahrain and the UAE, are no longer producing children at even the population replacement rate. Only Yemen and the Palestinian territories are going against the trend.

The piece frustratingly does not provide like measures for all countries, jumping from general fertility rate to adolescent fertility rate. Both, of course, bear on the subject.

I’m unable to find at the UN site the report that is being discussed. If anyone has access to it, I’d appreciate your passing it, or a link, along.

EDITORIAL: Mideast fertility rates plunge

Something dramatic is happening to fertility rates in the Middle East. For many years, most analysts and observers have focused on the remarkably high proportion of young people in Arab countries; those under the age of 25. This has provoked some crude commentary on the implications for birth rates and thus for the role of women in those countries. A great deal of that commentary now appears to be wrong-headed, according to new data from the Demographic and Social Statistics unit of the U.N. Statistical Division. Released last month, its findings were largely ignored in the holiday season.

They should have won much wider appreciation, for what they suggest is that Arab birth rates in general are dropping dramatically, and that the number of births among women under the age of 20 is dropping even more sharply. Overwhelmingly, the only places in the world where high birth rates are still the norm are in sub-Saharan Africa, and in Central America, and in two Arab countries: Yemen and the Palestinian territories.
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