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’.”
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.