Germany joins EU’s ‘ultra-low’ fertility club
Germany joins EU’s ‘ultra-low’ fertility club
Europe’s most populous country sees fertility rates fall below crucial threshold of 1.4
Three more EU member states — including the most populous, Germany — have joined the list of countries with “ultra-low” fertility rates, highlighting the extent of the region’s demographic challenges.
Official statistics show Germany’s birth rate fell to 1.35 children per woman in 2023, below the UN’s “ultra-low” threshold of 1.4 — characterising a scenario where falling birth rates become tough to reverse.
Estonia and Austria also passed under the 1.4 threshold, joining the nine EU countries — including Spain, Greece and Italy — that in 2022 had fertility rates below 1.4 children per woman.
The fall in birth rates partially reflects the “postponement of parenthood until the 30s”, which involves a “higher likelihood that you will not have as many children as you would like because of the biological clock”, said Willem Adema, senior economist at the OECD.
Without immigration, low fertility rates mean a shrinking working-age population, adding pressures on public finances and limiting economic growth.
With young people reaching milestones, such as buying a house, later in life, the average age of EU women at childbirth rose to 31.1 years in 2023, a year later than a decade ago. The figure rises is 31.4 in Germany, and over 32 years in Spain, Italy and Ireland.
Austria reported a fall to 1.32 children per woman in 2023, down from 1.41 in the previous year. In Estonia, the rate hit 1.31 in 2023, down from 1.41 in the previous year.
Birth rates have fallen across Europe — even in countries such as Finland, Sweden and France, where family-friendly policies and greater gender equality had previously helped boost the number of babies.
In Finland, the birth rate was above the EU average until 2010, but it dropped to 1.26 in 2023, the lowest since the record began in 1776, according to official data.
France had the highest birth rate at 1.79 children per woman in 2022, but the national figures showed it dropped to 1.67 last year, the lowest on record.
Rates fell lower also in countries where they were already ultra-low, reaching 1.12 in Spain and 1.2 in Italy in 2023.
Guangyu Zhang, population affairs officer at the UN, called for governments “to put more family-friendly and gender-responsive policy measures in place”, saying this would enable women and men to have the multiple children that surveys claim they want.
Experts believe economic and political upheaval partly explain the trend of people having fewer children.
“You might have a job, but if you’re worried about losing it, or worried about inflation or worried about conflict in Ukraine, then you still might hesitate to have children,” said Ann Berrington, professor of demography at the University of Southampton.
Changes in social attitudes might also be at play.
Adema said: “The norms of what it means to be a good parent and how intensive you should participate in that are such that quite a few young people say: ‘Well, in addition to the fact that I don’t need children to be happy, it would also be a very difficult job for me to do, and I’m not sure that I can take that responsibility’.”
I know in Spain the deposit (50k) for a two bedroom flat (250k) currently sits at about 30x the monthly median salary (1800€). People often save less than 10%.
People just can't afford to have kids in these countries. When it takes you 25 years to save the deposit for a flat, there isn't a need for many words to paint the story, the figures do all the work for you.
Other countries have different flavours of the cost of living crisis (e.g. needing to spend 20% of the salary for a commute into London, or people only being able to move out of their parents house when they're in their thirties) but the end result is that it's incredibly hard for people all across Europe.
My partner and I are both in the top 10% salary percentile for the UK and having a single kid would be a far greater burden than my parents had with three kids and a single salary. Not saying it's not doable at our current salary, just saying the financial implications are drastically different to when people were having 2.3 kids on average.
I'm sure personal finances play a role but that's not the whole picture. There's all sorts of sociological factors involved (tertiary education, women entering the work force in mass, contraception, etc.) People just don't want to have as many children as before, if any at all, and there's almost no social pressure in the other direction. It's a global trend.
BTW, I'm in Spain and your numbers are all over the place. Median monthly salary pre-tax is 2400€. Greater metropolitan areas are more expensive re housing, but salaries are also higher. Outside of those housing is dirt cheap. 75% of the population own their home, compared to 65% in the UK for instance.
Oh I meant post tax - median monthly pre tax is 1935€ according to this link which is based on data from INE, so as reliable as it gets. That's about 1600€ net at a 17% tax rate, so maybe I've actually gone a bit over.
And yes, you can get a cheap house in a town 50 km away from Badajoz but then good luck breaking past 1000€ net salary.
Plus only 31% of people under 35 own their homes - most people covered by that 75% figure are not in birthing age anymore. In the UK, about 39% of under-35s own their home. Not that comparing any country to the UK is desirable in this aspect, as the housing crisis is particularly dire in the UK.
I've left out intentionally many things like generational wealth, remote working, etc because this is a comment on Lemmy, not an economy thesis. But my point still stands - it's financially hard to have kids.
I agree with you on the other points though; it's not the only factor.
aside from economic issues that we are actively choosing to have due to how society is structured around constant growth (spoiler warning, this is unsustainable), i honestly just embrace it, we don't benefit from having so many people and not giving birth to tons of kids sounds great.
There's plenty of kids up for adoption and with smaller populations there's more space for everyone, we just need to fix more fundamental issues like wealth inequality which lets rich people keep having kids (pretty fucked up that rich people can buy the ability to have kids)
I wonder what the first two rules of "Ultra-low Fertility Club" are 🤔
First rule of „Ultra-low Fertility Club“: you don’t make children. Second rule of „Ultra-low Fertility Club“: you don’t make children.
But why would we revert falling birth rates? We're still way too many people on earth.
Because a) we're not actually near much less over the sustainable population limit and b) our current gerontocracy is already bad enough. Both societies that grow or shrink too quickly have lots of inherent issues. If, for the sake of argument, we did have to shrink the population we should still only go for a birth rate as low as 1.8 thereabouts to avoid fallout.
Kids are too expensive nowadays, way too much of a poverty risk, and people don't have enough time. Both are due to capitalist short-term interest. The ole story of mere aggregate microeconomics vs. macroeconomics and we're not even at sociology and ecology yet which also disagree with the microeconomics.
Because while low birth rates are a real thing that is happening (because of war, hunger, poverty, disease, climate change, and whatever other inequality), "overpopulation" is and always has been a (classist, ableist, racist) myth, to shift responsability away from capitalism, which is what causes war, hunger, poverty, disease, climate change, and whatever other inequality, for profit.
Higher human development index and lower birth rates are correlated. So the opposite of war, hunger poverty and so forth.
"the economy" aka we need slaving people doing the work and "we are afraid of immigrants"
Someone is going to have to take care for our elderly, and someone else has to pay for that. Immigration doesn't really solve that long-term and comes with its own issues on top of that. We'd have to change our countries pretty radically to tackle this issue and I very much doubt that's going to happen anytime soon.
Though I guess we would also need to change radically to get a birthrate at replacemen level.
Love the terms and conditions that forbid copying articles, followed immediately by a copy of the article. And wow, 1.4 children per woman is far below the 2 required to maintain a steady population. Hopefully the trend continues elsewhere, as overpopulation is rapidly becoming a big problem.
1.4 is a pretty sharp decline, and afaik we're not really seeing any serious overpopulation issues. We have enough food and houses for everyone, but can't distribute them efficiently enough.
But flattening out more would be good, rather than growing 1% a year. Let's get time to figure out better resource allocation, and get rid of fossil fuels before we have 10 billion people.