Low Fertility in Europe: Causes, Implications and Policy Options

The global population is at a turning point. At the end of 2004, the majority of the world’s population is believed to live in countries or regions below-replacement fertility, and the earlier distinct fertility regimes, ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, are increasingly disappearing in global comparisons of fertility levels (Wilson 2001, 2004). Several aspects of this convergence towards low fertility are particularly striking. First, the spread of below-replacement fertility to formerly high fertility countries has occurred at a remarkably rapid pace and implied a global convergence of fertility indicators that has been quicker than the convergence of many other socioeconomic characteristics. Second, earlier notions that fertility levels may naturally stabilize close to replacement level—that is fertility levels with slightly more than two children per women—have been shattered. Sustained below-replacement fertility has become commonplace, and Europe has been a leader in the trend towards low and very low fertility. Europe also witnessed in the last 15 years the emergence of unprecedented low fertility levels with a total fertility rate (TFR) at or below 1.3 children per woman. Kohler et al. (2002) have labeled these patterns as lowest-low fertility to emphasize the dramatic implications of these unprecedentedly low levels of fertility: for instance, if they persist over a long time in a contemporary low-mortality context, TFR levels at or below 1.3 imply a reduction of the annual number of births by 50% and a halving of the population size in less than 45 years. There have been no cases of sustained lowest-low fertility prior to 1990 (Figure 1). In the early 1990s, Italy and Spain were the first countries to attain and sustain lowest-low fertility levels, and in 2002 there were 17 lowest-low fertility countries in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe with a total population of over 278 million persons. As a matter of fact, the median total fertility rate, i.e., the TFR level below which 50% of the populations in Europe live, is currently with 1.31 only slightly above lowest-low fertility. Third, recent fertility trends have been accompanied by a remarkable divergence of European countries in terms of their fertility levels and