European births slideshow reloaded

2 Kings 4:16

Update for Q1 2023 can be found here.

Here comes an update to monthly births in Europe:

• Now including 26 countries (previously 13)

• Time series (from January 2017) complete until December 2022 for 23 countries, and November 2022 for 3 countries

• For most countries the figures are for live births. Some might include stillbirths but these do not change the overall picture

• For most countries the figures are by month of birth. When these were not (yet) available, I resorted to month of registration

Updates since first posting (February 22, 2023):

• Corrected image for Sweden (was a copy of the Portugal image until then)

• Updated data for Scotland (December 2022 less preliminary now)

• Updated data for Israel (now including December 2022)

• Updated data for Poland (now including December 2022)

• Added Slovenia, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary

• Updated data for England and Wales (after reading the Naked Emperor’s discussion of the latest ONS report)

• Updated data for Northern Ireland (now including December 2022)

• Updated data for Czech Republic (now including Q4 2022)

• Updated data for Italy (now including December 2022)

Feel free to dig into the data:

European Births

866KB ∙ XLSX file

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Remarks:

• The file also contains monthly deaths for most countries

• The “b” sheets display births (monthly birth figures 2017-2022; difference, per month, to median value of cumulative birth figures for 2017-2021)

• The “d” sheets (with greyish background) display deaths in the same way (which is not optimal; I would prefer comparison of 2020, 2021 and 2022 to the 2015-2019 median, but it is also instructive to use the exact same method as for births)

• Links to sources are provided in most cases

• For Hungary, I had to scale monthly figures for 2017 and 2018 (that I found on some UN page only) to the official annual figures (since I am using cumulative figures anyway, this does not create too much of a distortion)

• The “other” sheet collects some data on countries for which I could not find monthly data, or which are not in Europe

Voilà, an overview (sheet “diag”, with data from “home”):

For the diagram, I divided the 2022 cumulative monthly figures by the 2017-2021 median, and computed quantiles. The median (i.e, 50% quantile) has been around 93% throughout the year (ignore the “uptick” in December, remember that the dataset is not complete for December). This means that half of the countries in the sample have seen birth figures plummeting by 7% or more, compared to the reference chosen. No country (with the exception of the Netherlands in February) has exceeded the 2017-2021 median anytime in 2022.

Germany:

France:

Switzerland:

Austria:

England and Wales (caveat: involves some scaling):

Northern Ireland:

Scotland:

Sweden:

Portugal:

Spain:

Netherlands:

Belgium:

Norway:

Israel (honorary European, at least in the awful Eurovision Song Contest):

Italy:

Denmark:

Finland:

Poland:

Estonia:

Latvia:

Lithuania:

Romania:

Slovenia:

Czech Republic:

Slovakia:

Hungary:

Let us hope that the phenomenon is “only” temporary.