Financial Times:

According to the strict Islamic tradition in which she was brought up, Sahar should by now be married with children.

But while her mother married at 14 and lived with her husband in one room with her in-laws for the next 10 years, neither Sahar, 33, nor her two dozen cousins in the town of Borujerd have settled down or started a family — a trend that is increasingly alarming authorities in Iran.

“How can I marry someone who has no reliable income or is a drug addict which is the case of many young men here?” said Sahar, an unemployed accountant who lives with her sister and mother, all three surviving on a pension of IR20m ($87) per month. “How can I even think of having children when we can barely make ends meet now?”

Years of recession, high inflation and unemployment have all contributed to declining fertility rates in the Islamic republic. Iranian health authorities warned last month that the population growth rate had dipped below 1 per cent for the first time in the 12 months to the end of March.

The fertility rate in Iran is 1.7 children per woman, below the 2.1 births per woman needed to ensure the population remains the same, according to Iranian data. For the Middle East and north Africa as a whole, it was 2.8 births per woman in 2018, the last year for which World Bank data is available.

Urbanisation, a high literacy rate and the expansion of higher education have all contributed to the prevalence of family planning in Iran, relative to other states in the region, said Shahla Kazemipour, a professor of demography at Tehran University.

Hardliners warn that Iran could become the oldest country in the Middle East by 2050. In Iran’s last census in 2016, the median age was 31.1 years, up from 27.9 in 2006. For a country that sees itself as providing global leadership to the Shia Muslim world, some conservatives see declining population growth as part of a conspiracy by western states and Israel to decrease the number of Shias. 

Go to link