WASHINGTON — As governments around the world struggle with ways to reverse plunging birth rates, new US studies suggest they have ignored a key culprit -- the smartphone. "Is the iPhone Birth Control?" asked a paper published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, delving into why US fertility rates have fallen by 22% since 2007.
For a while, experts linked the decline to the recession that struck in 2008 when the global financial system nearly imploded, driving millions of people into hardship. But when the economy picked up, a rebound in births never came.
Myriad other reasons have been posited, such as increased use of contraception, more female education, and growing housing or childcare costs. However, no clear cause has been established.
So Middlebury College economist Caitlin Myers and her student Ezekiel Hooper tested a hypothesis that smartphones -- which emerged with the arrival of the first iPhone in 2007 -- might have something to do with it.
Until 2011, iPhones were available from a single US cellular network, AT&T, so they compared US counties that had near-universal AT&T coverage with those that had little or none during those years.
