Whereas over the past decade policymakers have been mostly focused on how to reverse the global infatuation with debt and how to reverse what appears to be a structural decline in inflation (assuming the economist-accepted definition of CPI which conveniently "hedonicaly adjusts" such surging costs as shelter, healthcare, education and in many cases food), an even more troubling trend has been observed in recent years: due to a culmination of factors including falling fertility rates, rising divorce rates and expensive real estate, family sizes across the world are shrinking.

And unlike in the past where this phenomenon was largely contained to Japan and a handful of developed nations, RBC notes that almost all countries are set to experience a decline in the number of children per household in the 2000 - 2030 period. More specifically, looking from 2015 out to 2030, Euromonitor expects developed markets to have a ~20% decline in the number of children per household and developing markets a ~15% decline. In fact, as the Canadian bank points out, it was as recently as 2012 when the number of couples without children globally surpassed the number of those with children.