The strange case of falling birth rates in the West

Not having children must represent some sort of vote of no confidence in the future, but what sort of vote is that?

Where are the children? President Boris Yeltsin was recently handed a report that suggested that the Russian population, currently 147.5 million, could fall to about 120 million by 2050. It fell by nearly half-a-million last year. The reason is two-fold: rising death rates among the middle- aged, particularly men, and a low birth rate. Russia - as a country, as a culture, as a people - is slowly dying.

But so too is much of continental Europe. While mortality continues to fall, the other side of the pincer movement on population, falling birth rates, is more evident in parts of western Europe than it is even in Russia. In eastern Europe as a whole, the total fertility rate, that is the numbers of live children that a mother will have during her lifetime, is 1.6, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. But in Germany, Italy and Spain the fertility rate is now down to 1.2 -1.3. So the implications for European population levels are almost as stark as those for Russia. On present UN projections, by 2025 the German population will have fallen from its present 82 million to 76 million, and by 2050 it could be down to 60-65 million.

The UK is in a slightly different position from most of the continent, for we have a slightly higher total fertility rate, 1.8. As a result, the UK population will continue to rise, from 58 million to a peak of just over 61 million in 2025, before falling. It is just about theoretically possible that the population of the UK will be higher than that of Germany in 50-60 years from now.

What is happening here? The phenomenon is particularly marked in continental Europe and in Japan: it is not so evident in the US, or in Canada and Australia. You can, perhaps, explain the low birth rate in Russia and the rest of eastern Europe in terms of the trauma and disruption of the transition from Communism to the market economy. But in prosperous, secure, western Europe? There must be something wrong, but what it is remains a mystery. We have recently at last begun to consider some of the effects of an ageing population, on public sector pensions, for example; but the reasons, as opposed to the consequences, are hardly discussed outside the academic world.

Demographers and social scientists have put forward a host of possible explanations. There is clearly some association with the rise in job opportunities for women. The greater the chance that women have of earning a good income, the greater the cost of taking some time off to have a family. There may be some lag here in the response of the rest of society. The labour market for women has grown faster than the social infrastructure which underpins it: everything from child-care to the willingness of male partners to pitch in with running the home.

The links are immensely complicated, but presumably there is some connection between the set of attitudes that lead to families breaking up and the willingness to have children. Maybe there is something in the assertion that adults have become more selfish, or at least more self-centred, in their choices: that they would prefer the extra money to spend on a holiday, and the extra time, rather than devote it to the extra child.

There are other more practical forces at work. The tax system does not help. If a women working from home has someone in to help run the home office, that can be charged against tax; but if the person is in the next- door room helping to look after the children, it cannot. You think people do not consider tax when they decide about having children? Not so. One of the reasons why the birth rate in Sweden jumped in the early 1990s was because the government introduced a tax break for mothers who had a third child within a certain period after the second. In the middle 1980s, despite elaborate state-funded provision for child-care, the Swedish fertility rate was below the UK's; now it is above it.

Economists might further point out that if you regard children as a luxury consumer good, they are becoming a relatively more expensive one. That is not just a silly point about the rising cost of pocket money, designer trainers, driving lessons or, for those who pay for it, private education. It is more that the growing specialisation of the job market means that young people are needing longer training and therefore moving into jobs in their twenties rather than their teens. Result: they inevitably rely on parents' support for a longer period than they would a generation ago. The amount of parental investment, in both money and time, needed for each child is therefore much greater than it used to be. It is suggested in the US that having a large family has now become a signal of wealth: it boasts that "we can afford the big house, the people mover and the cello lessons".

But it cannot just be economics, can it? The countries with those very low fertility rates - Germany, Italy and Spain - have seen an enormous increase in wealth over the past generation. Living standards are half as high again as they were in the early 1960s, when birth rates were double the present level. People are better housed all over Europe, and better fed. The fall in male fertility, however worrying in the long term, has yet to reach a point where it has an impact on birth rates. Not having children must represent some sort of vote of no confidence in the future, but if so, it is very hard to pin down what sort of vote that might be. There is surely less of an immediate fear of nuclear annihilation - that was, after all, in the time of the Cuban missile crisis and the building of the Berlin Wall.

It would be absurd to try to trot out some pat explanation for a social phenomenon which cuts across societies as different as Russia, Italy and Japan. But it is not absurd to peer forward into the future and seek some sort of turning point. There is, maybe, one in sight. Fertility rates in the US have risen from the trough in the 1980s, and they are no longer falling here. People on both sides of the Atlantic are more confident talking about "family values" (including our new government). Will this quest for more order and stability result in a modest rise in the birth rate here, and then maybe in the rest of Europe? I don't know - but I know that it matters more than the political debate about Europe's future.