European births, Q3 2023 update

Joel 1:4

This is the latest edition of my collection of monthly and annual births data for Europe.

European Births

575KB ∙ XLSX file

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As before, monthly births can be tracked for 25 countries. For another 15 countries, at least annual data are available (if all else fails, from Wikipedia).

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 12 of the 25 countries considered recorded less than 89% of the median for Jan. 2017-2020, and 12 recorded more).

Monthly births relative to 2017-2020 median for 25 European countries

The third quarter of 2023 confirms the trends of the two preceding quarters. 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.

The “home” sheet compares cumulative 2022 and 2023 figures for all 40 countries against the 2017-2021 median. The study of cumulative figures has a smoothing effect (Example: 89% median (red line) for Sep. 2023 means that during the first nine months of 2023, half of the countries in the sample recorded less than 89% of the median of the corresponding values for 2017-2021):

Cumulative births per month and year for 25 European countries (up to 40 countries at year-end) relative to 2017-2021 median

Note that the “drop” in the min curve in December of 2022 is due to Ukraine, and to the fact that monthly data for Ukraine are not available (otherwise the min curve would be lower in general). Many Ukrainian babies were born elsewhere in Europe in 2022 because their mothers had fled the country.

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 2017-2022

• sheet “fun”: correlation experiments

• sheet “months_vs_5” and “diag_vs_5”: monthly births for 2022 and 2023 against the 2017-2021 median

• 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”)