2022 Census: Has Brazil lost hope of having children? – 06/28/2023 – Vinicius Torres Freire

Brazil is going through a period of Chinese growth. In other words, the pace of population growth in both countries was similar over the last dozen years, around 6%. China, as you know, had a very tough birth control policy. Is the Brazilian population growing a little? Little by what criteria?

Before proceeding, remember that the growth rate calculated by the 2022 Census came as a surprise. The censused population is around 203 million, 11 million less than the projections or estimates of Pnad, from IBGE. By these accounts, the population had been growing at an annual rate of around 0.8% per year; by the Census, to just over 0.5%.

The difference causes a certain fury, still little informed, as details of the Census are missing to think about what happened. It may well be that the calibration of the IBGE surveys was a little crooked due to the lack of a mid-decade population count, for which there was no money.

A central state institution is being scrapped. The federal government spends R$ 2 trillion per year, but IBGE lacks it (we are not talking about the current government). It’s shameful and stupid.

That said, it’s better to believe the Census than estimates.

Is the population of Brazil growing little? International comparison is difficult. Consider, for example, the dozen-year growth from 2009 to 2021 or from 2007 to 2019, according to World Bank databases.

In Europe, there is the group of countries with low and falling growth, less than 2% in the period, such as Germany, Italy, tending to zero, or Portugal and Greece, negative. But in France, the population grew by close to 5%. In the UK, close to 9%. In happy Denmark and Holland, around 6%. In OECD countries, close to 7.5%.

The US population grew by 9%. In Mexico and Chile, around 15%.

These data have to be taken with a grain of salt and a tranquilizer. They are estimates, partly made in the death of the epidemic. They can also have deviations. Still, you can see the demographic disparity between similar countries in socioeconomic terms. Migration and economic crises help to understand just a little of the differences.

One problem of low population growth in a middle-income (and falling) economy like Brazil’s is premature aging. Soon, we may have few people working in relation to the number of dependents (sum of children and retirees, roughly speaking).

It was already foreseeable that Brazil would need a policy to attract immigrants — see the lack of skilled labor when the country was growing. Now it must become a critical issue.

What caused this slowdown in Brazilian growth? We don’t even know how the population was by age group, to begin with.

Did the economic collapse of the 2010s and the epidemic bring the numbers down? Doing the math over periods of dozens of years, Brazil has had worse collapses, as in the 1990s. In this crisis, would a generation have lost hope in the country and/or in having children?

What cultural or social change has there been in the family? In the attitude of women? Could emigration greater than immigration have had any effect? It would be small, judging by the country’s history.

The biggest fact is that we know each other little. The Census numbers may even change our understanding of the universe of work and the movements of the Brazilian economy. What proportion of those have a job or are looking for a job, for example?

The number of residents per household fell sharply from one decade to another (3.3 to 2.7). What does this say about housing, cities, family, social programs? How many children will need school and teachers?

We don’t really know any of that.

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