European births, Q4 2023 update
Lamentations 3:51
This is the Q4 2023 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). It arrives a little late because destatis, the German statistical authority, only published figures for December 2023 yesterday, on German Labor Day.
I have welcomed Bosnia/Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia into the circle of countries for which monthly births can be tracked. This circle now contains 28 countries. For another 12 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 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).
The final quarter of 2023 confirms the trends of the three 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.
Since the above method gives Germany (with around 700,000 annual births) the same weight as tiny Estonia (with around 10,000 annual births), I included an alternative. For the dashed red line, I summed births per month over all 28 countries, and then compared to the 2017-2020 median. The two red curves are pretty close, hence weighting is not that much of an issue.
The diagram based on cumulative figures is still included in the Excel file (see below) but I will not reproduce it here. Instead, for all 37 countries for which annual 2023 figures are available, I computed the ranks of the single years in the 7-year period 2017-2023. Sorted (descending, with the ranks interpreted as a 7-digit number) and painted (worst rank 7 in red, best rank 1 in white) the table looks like this:
The largest group (13 of 37) simply exhibits a stable downward trend, each year being worse than its predecessor. Some countries saw a short-lived baby boom in 2021, mostly after a bad 2020. Hungary’s government measures may have worked in 2020 and 2021, but now seem to have run out of steam (maybe a “tempo effect”). Portugal is a curious case.
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 “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”)
I look for your updates on this thought encompassing topic often. I really appreciate your skills and drive to keep us informed on this.