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Old Posted Jan 29, 2010, 1:47 PM
New Brisavoine New Brisavoine is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
Germany may change, with their very prominent Minister of Families offering new child care and work allowances.
The Minister of Family Affairs you're thinking of, Ursula von der Leyen, left the ministry last November and was replaced by Kristina Köhler, who incidently has no children, which is odd for a minister in charge of familly affairs.

The policies launched by Ursula von der Leyen were costly and they have apparently had no effects (there was a small bump of births in 2007 and 2008, then the number of births declined again in 2009), so I'm not sure they will keep giving money to parents (Elterngeld) if it doesn't manage to increase the number of births.

The truth is, the low birth rate in Germany is largely due to social and cultural factors, and has probably little to do with financial factors, so giving money to parents proved a bit useless. Furthermore, as the last generations of women born during the baby boom "retire" from procreative life, the number of women able to give birth will decrease a lot, and so the number of births should decrease still further. The baby boom in Germany ended in 1971, so the youngest women from the baby boom are now 38 y/o.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
Or perhaps growth in France will slow, as the population continues to urbanize and thus assume urban, small-family characteristics.
France is already a highly urbanized country. If anything, people are now moving BACK to the countryside, in a phenomenon of so-called "rurbanization" (people leaving the urban areas and moving to the rural commuter belts surrounding the urban areas, where they have more space). This phenomenon of rurbanization is of course less present in very dense coutries like England and Germany were there is less rural space left around the cities, but in France there are huge empty rural areas around all the cities where people can buy cheap land.

That being said, population growth in France should indeed decline in the future, for two reasons: a- women born during the baby boom will also "retire" from procreative life, as in Germany, so the number of French births should decline in the future, but not as much as in Germany (in France the baby boom ended in 1974, so the last women born during the baby boom are now 35 y/o, but the drop in births that followed the French baby boom was not as massive as in Germany), and b- life expectancy has increased a lot, so the number of old people has increased a lot, and eventually they will die, which will push up the number of deaths, thus mechanically reducing the excess of births over deaths. At the peak of this phenomenon, in the 2040s, when the generations born during the baby boom will die massively, the number of deaths in France could be as high as the number of births (while in Germany the number of deaths will be massively higher than the number of births).
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