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For Emmanuel Macron, more babies are essential to maintaining France’s national strength. Italy’s Georgia Meloni has made encouraging more Italian women to have children a top priority.
But demographers and economists say Europe’s attempts to boost stagnant birth rates are misplaced. They are calling for a rethink, including changes in policy to accept and embrace the economic realities of an aging population.
“Increasing fertility rates is very difficult,” says Anna, who, as an associate professor of labor market and family dynamics at the University of Warsaw, has seen birther policies fail to be achieved across central Europe for years. Matysiak says.
Fertility rates in Europe have hovered around 1.5 births per woman for the past decade. This number is above the lowest seen in East Asia, but far short of the 2.1 needed to maintain population levels. Matysiak and other experts interviewed by Reuters see this figure as highly unlikely to be achieved in the near future.
European governments are already spending billions of euros on top of basic welfare provisions to fund child-friendly measures, from cash incentives for children to tax breaks for large families, paid parental leave and child benefits. is provided.
But even France and the Czech Republic, which had relatively high fertility rates of around 1.8 in the past few years, are now seeing declines. The reasons vary across the continent and may not be fully understood.
deeper cultural change
Marta Seitz, a professor at the University of Madrid who specializes in family sociology, demographics and inequality, said Spain’s birthrate of 1.19 is the second lowest in Europe after Malta, due to rising housing costs and poor employment. He said factors such as anxiety are at play.
“People want to have children, they want to have them sooner, but structural reasons prevent them from doing so,” she said.
These economic constraints are felt everywhere. But there is also evidence of a deeper shift in cultural attitudes toward parents.
In Norway, a wealthy country with strong family support and job security, the birth rate has plummeted from 2 in 2009 to an all-time low of 1.41 by 2022.
In its 2023 country review, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) cited changing gender roles, increased focus on careers and even the potential for social media to increase feelings of insecurity as reasons for the decline. However, it concluded that the recession remains a challenge.
Finnish demographer Anna Rotkirch, in a study assessing a similar fertility decline in Finland, also found that many young people recognize the fundamental trade-off between parenthood and other goals. We are observing a profound cultural change.
“This applies directly to what is a desirable, comfortable and attractive life path, lifestyle, and broader values and ideals,” said Ms. Rotkirch, director and research professor at the Finnish Population Research Institute. said.
“No one knows what family policies will be effective in promoting fertility in this new situation.”
untapped potential
This, then, is a sign of the disastrous “population” often caused by aging and ultimately shrinking societies, unable to maintain pension payments, hamstrung by chronic labor shortages, and with no one to care for the elderly. Will Europe be blamed for the ‘ticking time bomb’ scenario?
It depends on whether a country’s economy can leverage the levers at its disposal to adapt.
David Miles, an economist at Imperial College London, rejects warnings of a “ticking time bomb”, saying that if per capita output levels are maintained, the population will decline, especially if people evolve to work more and better. states that a decline in living standards can be avoided.
“The logic that 65 is the age to stop working is deeply flawed,” Miles said, arguing that longer life expectancies and lower rates of strenuous work in Europe’s service-based economies have made this possible. . For people to stay in the labor market longer.
The move to raise the retirement age remains politically toxic. Witness the protests against Macron’s reforms last year. The age at which workers in developed countries exit the labor market has been slowly but steadily rising since around 2000.
Increasing women’s access to jobs could bring even more benefits. The share of European women in the labor market is about 69%, which is 11% lower than for men, meaning that they are more likely to be untapped.
“We can extract a lot of additional economic resources from that,” said Willem Adema, senior economist at the OECD’s social policy division, pointing to telework and other flexible arrangements as a way to support more women in the workforce. I mentioned it.
Europe could also import more labor. Beyond the noisy anti-immigration rhetoric, Europe already relies on around 10 million non-EU workers. Although the parental choices and welfare profiles of immigrants ultimately reflect the profile of the broader population, they have proven essential in addressing specific labor shortages.
And while we can discount predictions that automation and artificial intelligence are likely to boost the economy, they at least provide scope for productivity gains.
Finland’s Rotkirch stressed that there was still a need for family policies to support parenthood decisions, but called for a broader discussion on how to deal with low birthrates. He said that family policy alone will not solve the problem.
“You can see long-term trends,” Adema said. “If people don’t want to have children, there’s no point in forcing them.”
This story was reported by Reuters.
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