TFRs in East and West Germany 1980 - 1999

Like other Eastern European countries, East Germany experienced a sharp and rapid decline in period fertility rates after the fall of communism. While there were still 180,000 births in 1990, there were only 110,000 a year later - a drop in the number of births by about 40 percent over the period of a single year. During this time, migration from East to West Germany had reduced the population size in the East considerably. In the period 1989 to 1991 alone, about one million East Germans had migrated to the West. In this sense the massive East to West migration has clearly distorted the usefulness of the annual number of births as a fertility indicator since the potential number of mothers has been considerably reduced.

However the total fertility rate (TFR), which standardizes for population size and age structure, does shows a drastic reduction in fertility. As can be seen from the graph below, the East German TFR dropped from 1.5 in 1990 to 1.0 in 1991, reaching its lowest level of 0.8 in the years 1992 to 1995. Since that time the East German TFR has steadily increased, but has still not reached West German fertility levels.


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Although, there is a general consensus that in the years immediately subsequent to unification East Germany underwent a fertility crisis, there has been some dispute about the general course of East German fertility. In particular it is possible to contrast two rival hypotheses: a crisis and an adaptation one. Advocates of the ‘crisis hypothesis’ argue that unfavorable economic constraints have kept East Germany’s fertility below West German levels and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Supporters of the ‘adaptation hypothesis’ are more optimistic in that they argue that even though the East Germany economic environment has significantly fallen behind the West German one, individuals in the neue Länder (new federal states) are now subject to very similar institutional constraints as their counterparts in the alte Länder (old federal states). Assuming that family policies, tax regulations and ultimately the entire welfare system are important parameters in fertility decisions, one might expect East German fertility to converge towards West German levels were the economic environment, and in particular the labour market conditions, to imporove. Advocates of the ‘crisis hypothesis’ have taken the drop in annual birth rates as an unmistakable sign of an East German fertility crisis, and have even honed down the crisis view to ask whether East Germany (and possibly even the whole of Germany) might not now be caught in a fertility trap.

Other have suggested that while this interpretation might have been correct for the years around unification, it has now become increasingly inapplicable. It is well known that period fertility indicators are questionable in their reliability as indicators of longer term fertility trends, and in particular when there are rapid changes in childbirth timing. A decline in period fertility rates can indicate a decline in lifetime fertility, but it might also be a reflection of the postponement of motherhood to higher ages. This aspect seems to be of particular importance in the case of East Germany. Like most other former Eastern Bloc countries the mean age of women at childbirth was very low in East Germany - when compared with Western Europe - at the end of the 1980s.

In 1989, the mean age at childbirth was just 24.7. On the other hand,the mean age at childbirth in West Germany was 28.3 in the same year.

This considerable difference in the age at childbirth between East and West Germans is crucial for understanding the depth of the ‘East German fertility decline’. Even if East German women, who were childless in 1990, temporarily gave up on childbearing during the upheavals of unification, they were generally young enough to postpone childbearing to later periods in their lives without hitting the biological limits to fertility. In other words, what looks like a fertility crisis from the point of period fertility indicators could in fact be a postponement of childbirth to West German age levels.

This being said, the ongoing level of fertility in West Germany is itself well below replacement, so that even a modest recovery in East German tfrs would hardly be a resolution of the German "fertility issue".

Percentage of out-of-wedlock births in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, 1960–1995

A close look at the data suggests reveals no clearcut correlation between family formation/dissolution patterns and fertility levels. The percentage of “illegitimate” births in Mediterranean Europe was minimal before the 1980s and in Italy and Spain even only reached a rate of about 1 out of 10 births by the mid 1990s.

In contrast this proportion reaches approximately one-third of all births in France and the United Kingdom and over one-half of those in Sweden by the 1990s. This percentage tends to rise steadily from year to year in spite of sizable short-term fertility fluctuations, especially in Sweden and France. In the case of Germany, however, it is noticeable that the percentage of children born out of wedlock had stabilized by the 1990s (around one-sixth): this is an interesting result since marriage and the family are protected by the German Constitution and since unification the number of births has been halved in the east, where “illegitimacy” was previously massive (See table below). Countries with so-called traditional family structures (high marriage rate, low divorce rate, low illegitimacy rate, etc.) like Italy and Spain were totally “detraditionalized” in terms of fertility in less than two decades. The level of births in these two countries has plummeted to previously wholly unpredicted levels. No official population forecast, either national or international, had anticipated a total fertility rate of 1.2 for any country, and least of all for the Mediterranean countries, which are still commonly viewed as “laggards” and often as being family-oriented. This outcome is probably the biggest surprise in European demographics as it entered the present century.



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Number of women with 3 or more children for the birth cohorts 1935 to 1960 in 6 EU Countries

One factor influencing the birth rate level of a country is the number of women who have children, and in particular the proportion of women having children in what are called the "higher order parities" - ie more than three children. The number of German women giving birth to three or more children is lower than in other European countries. Using data from Eurostat, it can be seen from the graph below that the percentage of families with three and more children already stopped declining with the cohort of women born in 1945. Around one of five German women born between 1945 and 1960 decided to have three children or more, while in France every third woman did.

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It is often assumed that the high rate of childlessness in Germany is the principal reason for Germany's continuiong low birth rate of below 1.5 children per woman. However, breaking down birth rate in terms of first, second, third and fourth children shows that replacement level fertility in France is sustained both by the higher proportion of women who have a child, by very second child fertility rates and by comparatively high fertility rates for birth orders of three and above (see chart below). In Finland and Great Britain there are proportionally as many third and higher order births as in France, but there are fewer first and second order births. As a result, the total fertility rate is 0.2 children per women below replacement. In Germany, birth rates of all orders are low, but while the difference between Germany and France is just 18 children per 100 women due to a higher rate of childlessness, the differences due to lower second, third and forth order births amount to 35 children per 100 women taken collectively. In short, the gap between France and Germany is severely aggravated by the fact that fewer women decide to have two or more children, and is not simply the result of a higher rate of German childlessness.

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Mean Age of Women At First Childbirth, Europe 2003

The map in below presents the mean ages of mothers at first birth in Europe around 2003, and shows the extent of postponement in the timing of parenthood. To put these data in perspective -- in 1975 the highest mean age at first birth registered in Europe was 25.7 (in Switzerland), and in the majority of countries the indicator was between 22 and 24 years. Most researchers interpret this as part of the general trend towards postponement of choices that are irreversible or hardly reversible, usually associated with the ideational and other changes linked to the so-called “second demographic transition”. Again in line with the predictions of the second demographic transition theory about the importance of individual autonomy and self-expression, the differences between individuals within a population in the timing of parenthood are also increasing.


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Low Fertility Hypothesis

In a recent post on Demography Matters Claus offered a nice summary of the latest revision of the low fertility trap hypothesis as advanced by Wolfgang Lutz et al. As summarized below, there are three basic components to this hypothesis:



As Lutz says the key idea is that once fertility falls below a certain level (and even in the event that the hypothesis proved to be well founded this level could only be determined empirically, on the basis of actual experience) a self-reinforcing demographic regime may be established from which it is hard to escape, in the sense of raising fertility back up towards replacement levels. The cut-off point which Lutz et al start from is 1.5 (and in this they take their lead from a proposal by Peter Macdonald in this paper ). This figure does seem to have some coherence in terms of actual experience to date, since with the exception of Denmark - which did briefly fall under 1.5 tfr in the 1990s - no country seems to have gone below it and come back up again.
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Net reproduction rate in France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, 1900–1995

Another characteristic of the Swedish pattern is that Sweden, along with France and the United Kingdom, was one of the few EU countries where the total fertility rate never fell below the level of 1.6 children per woman. A historian of the welfare state might be tempted to remind us that public officials in these three countries feared a population decline in the 1930s and that the creators of the social security systems (William Henry Beveridge in England, Pierre Laroque in France, and the Nobel Prize winner Alva Myrdal in Sweden) had comparable views — i. e., pronatalist —on population matters and implemented a family-oriented social policy at the time of World War II. This explicit demographic preoccupation progressively eroded or vanished in the following decades, but family support is still a non-negligible component of the welfare state. Few experts could imagine that the Italian TFR was going to go lower than the British rate in the 1950s and 1960s (See Table Below).

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Total fertility rate in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, 1960–1996

To design a population policy, the decision maker has to use an index that is not biased by age structure and that reflects the sheer propensity to have children: the total fertility rate. The indicator is permanently calculated for the purpose of international comparisons, and it is widely produced to show the impact of a given plan (antinatalist or pronatalist) of action. The table below shows that the European trends are radical. In most of the “big” countries of the EU, the total fertility rate fell on average by 1.0 to 1.4 children per woman. In Spain, the decline was much sharper: 2.90 at the beginning of the 1960s but only 1.15 in 1996, 1.75 in absolute terms and hence a relative decline of 60%. There is no more Mediterranean or Catholic fertility, since Italy and Spain have experienced the lowest fertility ever seen in the history of mankind.

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A comparison between northern and southern Europe through the examples of Sweden and Italy is instructive. Until the 1970s the Swedish fertility rate was lower than the Italian rate, and it was under the EU curve (See Graph Below). Now the opposite is true; new generations of Swedish women have more children than corresponding Italian women.

Number of births in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, 1960–1995

In the United Kingdom as well as in Italy, the annual number of births in the mid- 1960s was close to 1 million; it has fallen by one-quarter in the United Kingdom and by nearly one-half in Italy. In Germany, the absolute decline is still more impressive: 1.3 million in 1965 compared to about 0.8 million in 1995; the difference is 500,000 births per year (See table below). The case of France differs for two reasons: there the fertility decrease was not as steep as in neighboring countries of continental Europe, and the age structure had a protective impact; France had more baby boomers at childbearing ages. These crude data on births are important because they shape the age structure, and finally they constitute the most essential variable for political authorities at all levels (local, regional, national, and international). Under present conditions of very low mortality, they determine the number of students, the number of future inflows in the labor market, the number of consumers, of taxpayers, etc.; they have a decisive impact on long-range variations in demand, on investment (infrastructure, housing), and on corresponding sectorial labor needs (teachers, doctors, builders, etc.).

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Population of the five largest member countries of EU-15 .

The movement towards population stagnation has been similar for all nations within the European Union. To simplify the presentation, we have produced population figures for the five largest member countries at the turn of the century (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom), which together comprise 80% of the total population of EU- 15. The German population has tended to stabilize around 80 million; the French, Italian, and British a bit below 60 million; and the Spanish slightly below 40 million (See table below). Leaving aside immigration, the total population of these five countries could peak at about 300 million and then, if present fertility trends persist, begin to shrink.

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Population, natural increase, and net migration in the EU-15, 1960–1995

In the old EU-15, the rate of population growth has been slowing down and is now close to zero; immigration is the unique factor that has had a dampening effect on this slackening process (in many cases, it prevents straightforward depopulation.

Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s, the natural increase fell by more than two million, from 2.56 million in 1965 to 0.33 million in 1995. As the number of deaths was approximatively constant, this phenomenon essentially can be attributed to a substantial drop in the number of births, which declined by more than one-third in only three decades (from 6.1 million in 1965 to 4.0 million in 1995). Despite the fact that in 2000 the EU has 100 million more inhabitants than the United States (370 million versus 270 million), the number of births in the mid 1990s was similar (3.915 million in the United States in 1996). During the last few years, for the first time in the history of the European community, the contribution of immigration to population growth has becopme stronger (indeed, much stronger) than the impact of natural increase (which, in turn, is stimulated by past immigration), as the table below indicates. The lesson is clear: the EU is entering a new historical stage, the age of migratory dependency.

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Births in Europe In the Twentieth Century

On the eve of World War I, the average number of annual births in Europe was 10 million for a total population of 300 million inhabitants; by the year 1995, this number had dropped to 6 million for a corresponding population of 500 million; hence, the population had increased by two-thirds while the number of births fell by 40%. Such a decline was structural and even rather linear; the following data represent the number of births (in thousands) from decade to decade throughout the twentieth century:






The post-World War II baby boom was limited in time, space, and magnitude; it occurred only among the Western allies and its duration was usually short (15 to 20 years). In 1960 as well as in 1950, the number of births in Europe was similar to its 1940 level: around 8 million; the idea of a fertility cycle had no meaning for Europe as a whole. The 1940s and 1950s marked a stagnation, not an upswing. Then the secular movement resumed steadily, but it is very difficult to predict the bottom line since we have no comparable reference in our past. In 1996 the total fertility rate for Europe, with or without the European part of the former Soviet Union, was 1.4 — the lowest in the world. For Europe alone the birth deficit — defined by the difference between the number of births required for replacement and the number observed — is now in the region of about 2 million per year.

Total Fertility Rate England and France 1750 to 2000

The following chart shows the relative evolution of the Total Fertility Rate as between England and France, 1750 to 2000


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Fertility in the UK and France 1750 to 2000

British and France were the first really modern nation-states and, as a consequence, were among the first (along with Sweden and the Netherlands) to enter the demographic transition. The French Revolution marked the beginning of the secular fertility decline in France, whereas the industrial revolution in England encouraged family formation (earlier marriage, higher fertility). Throughout the nineteenth century, the fertility gap between these two nations was hugely detrimental to France as can be seen from the graph.


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During the 1800–1880 period, the difference between Britain and France ranged between 1.3 and 1.8 children per woman: that is the same value as the difference between the prevailing present fertility and zero. This fertility differential evidently had tremendous implications for foreign policy and for the fate of the future European colonies. As a consequence of this relative differential France lost its position of leadership to England; the French language regressed all over Europe and, contrary to English, never acquired a world status; moreover, French emigration was very limited. By contrast, from the beginning of the nineteenth century British emigrants exported their ideas, their ideals, and their language on all continents. In “northern” America (north of the Rio Grande), only 2% of the entire population (namely,the population which is to be found in Quebec) uses the French language to communicate in daily life.

As can also be seen above, staring at the turn of the 19th century French fertility has gradually regained its relative position vis-a-vis the UK.

Regional Divergence in Germany

Since reunification, approximately 1.5 million people have left the former East Germany. In the states of Thuringia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, population numbers have reduced by between eight and twelve percent, since the time of reunification. In the western states there are also shrinking regions: in the Ruhr Basin, Saarland and along the former German-German border. Economically strong areas in the West have profited from the migration of young and qualified people. Particularly Bavaria and Baden-Wurttemberg have been able to increase their population, and both states continue to benefit from internal migration.

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Source: Berlin Institute For Population Development

Childless Women in Six EU Countries

This graph shows the evolution of childlessness among women in 6 EU countries between 1935 and 1960. The countries in question are FRG (West Germany), FI (Finland), FR (France), GB (United Kingdom),IT (Italy), NR (Netherlands).

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