European births, Q3 2024 update
1 Chronicles 4:27
This is the Q3 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). Note that I had to interpolate some data for Norway (currently they are only publishing results per quarter).
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, March and April (and May to September are worse). The countries sharing a border with Ukraine or Russia are worst off. Dear warmongers in the European Union and elsewhere, can you see what you are doing (and why do I have do drag such comments along for years)?
Guide to the Excel file:
sheets “home” and “diag”: cumulative 2022-2024 figures for up to 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 2021-2024 against the 2017-2020 median
country sheets: data on monthly births and deaths; diagrams (“b”) show cumulative annual figures against the 2017-2021 median (as in “home”)
Very interesting data. Thank you for preparing it! It would be very interesting to compare the years 2019 to 2021 with the years 2022 to 2024, as well as a longer period from, say, 2010. The horizontal curve in 2021 could also be a coincidence.