Countries such as Cuba, the Republic of Korea and Thailand joined the expanding group of countries with fertility below replacement level in the 1980s and 1990s. At around the same time, countries of Southern, Eastern and Central Europe with low fertility saw their total fertility rates fall even further, sometimes as low as 1.3 births per woman, and stay at that level for decades (Kohler et al., The five countries or territories with the world’s lowest total fertility rates are in East Asia and South-East Asia. In the largest cities in China, fertility was as low as 0.8 in the 1990s and 2000s (Guo and Gu, 2014). Some studies suggest that a long-term “great divergence in fertility” across more developed countries has taken place (McDonald, 2006, Rindfuss et al.,