Persistent Drop in Fertility Reshapes Europe's Future
By FRANK BRUNI
<<Population replenishment -through mass migration- anyone? Where the tax payers are going to come from?>>
FERRARA, Italy — On a recent night at the Blue Elephant recreation center here, a clutch of parents watched adoringly as dozens of 3- and 4-year-olds sprinted through a colorful playroom, bounced on the cushioned floor or doodled on drawing pads, aglow with creative pride.
It was Italy as outsiders still imagine it: child-worshiping and family-loving.
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But there was something wrong with the picture. Most of the parents were gazing at one, and only one, child.
That was true of Gianluca Valenti, who said that giving his son any siblings would be too exhausting and expensive, and of Barbara Lenzi, who said that more than one child "doesn't seem to make sense."
It was also true of Rosa Andolfi, who responded to a question about having an additional child as if a vampire were near.
"Basta!" Ms. Andolfi more or less yelped, then made a cross with her index fingers and thrust it forward.
That gesture was not just funny but telling; it touched on an increasingly worrisome reality for Italy and other European countries whose fertility rates have plummeted over the last decades, shifting one-child families close to the statistical norm.
In Spain and Sweden, Germany and Greece, the total fertility rate — or the average number of children that a woman, based on current indicators, is expected to give birth to — was 1.4 or lower last year, according to the World Health Organization.
In no West European country did the rate reach 2.1 — the marker that, demographers say, means an exact replenishment of the population. By contrast, the United States had a 2.0 rate, which demographers attribute to greater immigration.
While that trend has been evident for many years, its slow-building consequences are now coming into starker relief, as more West European countries acknowledge and take new steps to address the specter of sharply winnowed and less competitive work forces, surfeits of retirees and pension systems that will need to be cut back deeply.
In Italy, where the fertility rate last year was 1.2, according to the health organization, Labor Minister Roberto Maroni has announced that the cost of the state pension system will need to be reduced. Mr. Maroni said the government would offer incentives, which he did not specify, to keep people at work past the minimum retirement age of 57.
The United Nations recently published data suggesting that the population of Spain could decline to about 31.3 million in 2050 from about 39.9 million now. According to the World Health Organization, Spain's fertility rate last year was 1.1, the lowest in Western Europe.
Many provinces in Italy's wealthy, well-educated north have rates well below that.
The rate in the province of Ferrara, which includes the city of Ferrara, has been under 0.9 for each of the years since 1986 that Italy's National Institute of Statistics kept track.
Ferrara officials talk about the dearth of young children in the streets, the closing of elementary schools over the last decade and a pervasive sense that something is missing.
"There's a lack of energy," Deputy Mayor Tiziano Tagliani said in a recent interview here. "The society is colder without children."
Nationwide, Italy's fertility rate has been so low for so long — under 1.5 since 1984 — that the country offers an especially good glimpse into the dimensions and dynamics of the trend.
For example, Italy now has the world's oldest population. The percentage of people 60 or older is 25, compared with 16 percent in the United States, according to the population division of the United Nations.
The division's experts project that by 2050, if current trends hold, 42 percent of Italy's population will be 60 or older.
Antonio Golini, a professor of demographics at the University of Rome, Sapienza, said that would be "unsustainable, from a cultural and even psychological point of view."
That sense of alarm was reflected in Pope John Paul II's first-ever address to the Italian Parliament in November. The pope said "the crisis of the birthrate" in Italy was a "grave threat that bears upon the future of this country." |
