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.
I don't know why this isn't pointed out a lot harder every time the topic comes up. It used to be normal for women to stop working when they had kids. Now for both sociological and economic reasons (it's not just lost wages, it's the resume gap), it's become a rare phenomenon.
Even in countries with decent parental leave, it's not enough to cover the harder years of parenting (0-3) and parents therefore have to shell out enormous sums to kindergartens which aren't even open the whole year and whose workers are waaay underpaid and in shortage (which has caused quite a few child mistreatment scandals in my country).
There aren't 50 ways around this issue. We have to provide strong incentives for people to have kids, which overcome the severe penalty that taking a couple years off work has on a career.
TL;DR socialize child care so having kids can be a burden-free choice
(I will also point out that urban design has an impact on the ability to raise children. When you live somewhere car-dependent, you'll be driving your children everywhere, all the time and that is time consuming as all hell. My parents used to bike everywhere to get to their extracurriculars, but they did not even consider that a possibility for mine because the world had changed and the suburbs had become too dangerous for a child to roam alone on a bicycle)
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.
My bad, I somehow thought that was the average.
Still, it's apples and oranges. Minimum wage is 1323€, way over the 1k you mention, you'd pay no taxes on that, and you could buy a house for as low as 20k in a smaller sized city like Ponferrada.
I'm not saying it's not hard, I'm just saying Spain's housing situation is nothing like in other places like the Netherlands or Germany. Your example was just a bit disingenuous. You don't buy a 250k flat if you're on median wage. But you can buy one almost everywhere else. It's kind of like comparing prices London and some village in Wales.
Spain is huge and extremely concentrated in a few places. The housing crisis in Madrid and Barcelona could easily be solved by decentralization and moving national institutions to other places.
250k is not just Madrid and Barcelona. In fact, a friend just bought a 2 bedroom in Madrid for close to 400k and it's not even within the M30.
250k is Oviedo, A Coruña, León, Zaragoza... I obviously don't know the details for all the small cities but this is a pretty typical price. And of course, cities with higher prices also have higher wages and vice versa, but that's rather obvious.
I feel you might be missing my point though. My intention wasn't to go into the full detail of a specific country but rather to illustrate the general situation with an example.
My point is that different places in Europe have different flavours of a cost of living crisis. Be it expensive housing, be it mini jobs, be it needing to spend 5x the annual salary in a car, an unstable job market... There's something in almost every country across Europe that makes it so that having a child isn't an obvious, easy, natural thing to do, but rather an incredible burdensome financial commitment. This is happening to a generation already defined by financial distress, student debt, not being able to afford to live independently... So millennials are quite rightfully wary of large financial commitments.
(And again, this is just the financial angle, there's of course more social/cultural reasons for people not to have kids; but in my opinion this is the biggest factor)
Yeah, I agree with your point, it's just that you chose a pretty bad example. I happen to know the northeast pretty well because I moved here and I could go into detail about Oviedo, León or Coruña but I really don't care enough about it to argue my point any further. I hope you have a nice rest of your day :)
Hahaha, I guess you are not used to the concept of "falso autonomo" and the fact that several companies pay for half a day while expecting you to work for the whole day.
It's not legal, sure, but no one is challenging it and it's the reality of a lot of Spaniards.
I am unfortunately. It's also unfortunate that it happens everywhere else in Europe. Having lived in Germany the minijobs situation is kind of similar. I lived in London for a couple of years too and I remember shit like that happening with internships at the company I worked for at the time and friends working at bars BTW, if you know of cases like that, you should report them. There's a government anonymous report system and they do check the reports.