New Zealand's fertility rate has dropped below two births per woman for the first time in a decade, officially ending a "baby blip" that peaked in 2008 just before the global recession hit.
Statistics NZ says the country's total fertility rate - the number of babies a woman will have in her lifetime if current age-specific fertility rates stay the same throughout her life - fell from 2.01 in 2013 to 1.92 last year, the lowest since 2002.
A fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman is required to maintain the population, allowing for infant mortality.
The "baby blip", which saw the fertility rate peak at 2.19 in 2008, is seen by demographers as a faint echo of another upward blip around 1990, which represented babies being born to the children of the great post-war baby boom in which the fertility rate peaked at 4.31 births per woman in 1961. The latest blip was partly a "catch-up" as women who delayed having babies in their 20s finally started having children in their 30s and 40s.
Apart from these two blips, New Zealand's fertility rate has been below replacement level for most of the time since the late 1970s, averaging just 2.03 births per woman over the past 30 years.
