European births, Q1 2024 update
Amos 5:13
This is the Q1 2024 edition of my collection of monthly and annual births data for Europe (for a guide to the Excel file, see the bottom of this post).
As before, I plotted monthly births against the 2017-2020 median (in the Excel file: “months_vs_4” for the data, and “diag_vs_4” for the diagram), and computed quantiles of the resulting distributions of quotients (Example: 89% median (red line) for Jan. 2023 means that 13 of the 28 countries considered recorded less than 89% of the median for Jan. 2017-2020, 13 recorded more, and 89% is the mean value for the two countries in the middle). As an alternative (with very different weighting of countries), for the dashed red line, I summed births per month over all 28 countries, and then compared to the 2017-2020 median.
Things look in 2024 as they did in 2023. Monthly births are on the way down; both the beginning of 2022 and the beginning of 2023 seem to mark cliffs. Go back nine months from there to investigate. Note that the uptick in February is mainly due to 2024 being a leap year. After scaling with 28/29 (which is a bit of an overcorrection because the leap year 2020 affects the 2017-2020 median), February is on a par with January and March.
Guide to the Excel file:
sheets “home” and “diag”: cumulative 2022 and 2023 figures for all 40 countries against the 2017-2021 median
sheet “source”: links to the data sources
sheet “years”: overview of annual births 2017-2023, including ranks
sheet “months_total”: alternative (sum births over countries, then compare to 2017-2020 median)
sheet “fun”: correlation experiments
sheet “months_vs_4” and “diag_vs_4”: monthly births for 2021, 2022 and 2023 against the 2017-2020 median
country sheets: data on monthly births and deaths; diagrams (“b”) show cumulative 2022 and 2023 figures against the 2017-2021 median (as in “home”)
Thanks for the update!
As usual we don't have a good explanation for what is happening. I can tell you a story that it is because of the vaccines and I can also tell you a story that it is because of people's view of the state of the world (climate catastrophe, terrible politics; eg, us presidential debate with two geriatrics, war, inflation, etc), and I can tell you a story it is because of online porn, and so on. The fact that it continues to decline at the same rate is curious.
Thanks for update, CM!
Have you explored adjusting the birth figures for population changes? (i.e. age-specific birth rates along the same lines as for the death rates.) The rates are certainly falling but perhaps when pre-existing trends in age-adjusted rates are considered it is not as drastic as appears on first sight.
So, to what extent might the fall in birth rates in many western countries be due to shrinking cohorts of child-bearing women (or even just the average age of this cohort becoming older) and thus represent a similar phenomenon to the rise in death rates being largely due to expanding cohorts of elderly?
Might a very simple check be to look at potential correlations between the rate of change in median age per country with the rate of change in birth rate?
Tja, I've been meaning to this with the German data for quite a while...