Scientists have found that due to the coronavirus pandemic, fertility has noticeably decreased in all European countries. In particular, this affected Italy, Portugal and other southern countries of the subcontinent: there this figure fell by 6-9%. The conclusions of the scientists were published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We followed how the birth rate changed in a large set of developed countries, including the United States and many European countries. These observations showed that the birth rate declined significantly more than predicted values in seven countries at once, which was especially typical for countries the south of Europe, “the researchers write.
In recent months, scientists have begun to take an active interest in the social and economic consequences of the pandemic. In particular, American doctors recorded a sharp increase in the level of alcohol and hard drug use during the first waves of the pandemic, and also found evidence that the birth rate in the United States should have dropped by about 16% at the end of last year.
Demographers led by Seth Sanders from Cornell University (USA) were interested in how this indicator has changed over the past year, not only in the United States, but also in two dozen other industrialized countries, which account for about 37% of global coronavirus infections.
Demographic impact of the pandemic
These include many European countries, as well as Singapore, Japan, Israel and South Korea. Scientists analyzed statistics on fluctuations in the birth rate in these countries over the past ten years and compared these changes with how this indicator changed in 2020.
These calculations indicated that the pandemic did significantly reduce the birth rate in 18 developed countries of the world studied at once. At the same time, scientists found that the pandemic had an unusually strong impact on the demographic situation in seven states at once, including Singapore and six European powers.
Most of all, these changes have affected several countries at once in southern Europe. As the calculations of scientists show, in Italy the birth rate fell by 9.1%, in Spain – by 8.4%, in Portugal – by 6.6%. Similarly, the rate declined in Hungary (8.5%), while in Austria and Belgium it decreased by about 5.2-5.5% compared to pre-pandemic levels.
Sanders and his colleagues found that fertility in countries in northern Europe did not fall, but increased over the past year and a half. According to the researchers, this may be due to the relatively small scale of the pandemic on the territory of these states, as well as to the presence of a developed system of social support on their territory.
