Baby gap
Why there are
so few babies in southern Europe
It’s mostly economics
THE MUSEODEGLI INNOCENTI in Florence has an
unusual name and hosts an unusual display: a collection of small broken
objects, mostly medallions. They were split in two when a baby was delivered to
Florence’s hospital for foundlings. Half the object, known as
a segnale di riconoscimento, was kept at the hospital—in reality, a children’s home—while the other went to the mother. Should she wish to reclaim the
child, she would have proof it was hers. Many of the children were born out of
wedlock. But others were from families without the means to feed another mouth.The segnali are reminders of a time when
Italy had an excess of births. Today, in common with many other European
countries, it has hardly any. Its fertility rate (the average number of babies
each Italian woman can expect to have) has dropped from 2.66 in 1964 to 1.24 in
2020. In one region, Sardinia, it is below 1. This makes Italy part of a band
of ultra-low fertility across southern Europe, from Portugal and Spain (1.40
and 1.19) in the west to Greece and Cyprus (1.39 and 1.36) in the east. As 2.1
children per woman are needed to keep numbers stable, these countries must have
more babies, admit more immigrants or see their populations dwindle.Only the first of these options appeals to Europe’s right-wing populists. So they are keen to find ways to persuade
native-born women to have bigger families. Few have put such emphasis on the
birth rate as the Brothers of Italy, the hard-right party whose leader, Giorgia
Meloni, is the country’s new prime minister. The
encouragement to Italians to multiply flows in part from the party’s opposition to unauthorised immigration. “Support
for the birth rate and the family” was top of a list of
15 policy objectives in its electoral manifesto.Constrained by Italy’s huge gross
public debt, of around 147% of GDP, Ms Meloni’s
government has so far had limited scope for realising its aims. The budget for
next year nevertheless includes some changes that the finance minister,
Giancarlo Giorgetti, has suggested are just the beginning. They include an
increase in child benefits for the first child and for families with more than
three children; a modest extension of maternity leave; reductions in
the VAT on baby-care products; and changes in the pensionable age so
that the more children a woman has, the earlier she will be able to retire.In the worldview of the new right, feminism has given
rise to generations of women who would rather work and play than raise
children. But this narrative ignores two crucial facts. The first is that the
most staunchly feminist countries, those in northern Europe, now have some of
the continent’s highest birth rates. And the second is that women are
often not opposed to having children; they are having fewer than they say they
want, mostly for economic reasons.Globally, a fairly robust law has long linked national
wealth and birth rates: as countries become richer, birth rates fall. But a
group of researchers at the Centre for Economic Policy Research argue that
among the richest nations the opposite now applies. In theOECD, a club
mostly of rich countries, there is now a positive correlation
between GDP per head and fertility, they find (see chart). The most
likely explanation for this is complex. As women enter the workforce, they
increase economic output with their labour and talent. They may also then vote
for governments that spend money making it easier to be both a parent and an
employee. Spending on family support also correlates positively with fertility.
Generous paid maternity leave is one such policy; and the evidence that
supports spending on child care is even stronger. If women cannot easily work
in the early years of a child’s life, the work-family
trade-off remains ironclad.In Malta—once called “more Catholic than the pope” but now
boasting Europe’s lowest fertility rate, at 1.13—women are still more than 30 times more likely than men to drop out
of work to look after their families. The tension between money, career and
family can be acute. Marie Briguglio, a former senior civil servant, chose to
postpone having her only child until she was 38. She says it was about the
opportunity cost: had she had children earlier her rise through the
administration would have been jeopardised.“I played the lottery every week after my second son was
born,” says Inés, a
small-business owner in Madrid. Having failed to score the winning ticket, she
decided not to have the third child she would have liked. The gap in Spain
between the number of children born (1.19 per woman) and the number desired
(around two) is one of Europe’s highest. Alicia Adserà, an economist at Princeton, looks for explanations wider than those
(like child care, maternity leave, child tax breaks or men’s housework) directly related to family. She says that broader
conditions—in particular the jobs market—play a critical role too.Spanish women surged into education and work after the “national Catholic” dictatorship of Francisco
Franco, who died in 1975. The country built a wave of child-care centres, and
today subsidises them with a voucher each month. Spanish maternity leave is relatively
miserly (16 weeks) by European standards; but men get the same amount as women.
Grandparents provide a great deal of help with children, and for richer
families, immigration (especially from Latin America) provides a source of
affordable nannies.But despite all that, Spain lags begin in one crucial
area: opportunities for the young. The youth unemployment rate is among the
highest in the rich world, at around 35%. A study of the years 2008-16 found
Spanish youngsters worked for almost eight years stringing together temporary
contracts before landing a permanent one. This delays marriage as well as
childbirth; almost half of 25- to 34-year-olds now live with their parents.
When Spaniards do finally couple up they have experienced the freedoms of childless
adulthood for a decade. Around a fifth of women go on to have no children at
all, a big driver of the overall drop in fertility. For those who take the
plunge, the average age of women at first birth, at 31, is one of the highest
in Europe, along with Italy and Malta. Many stop there; one-child families are
so common thatEl Mundo, a conservative newspaper, envisioned a
future country “without brothers and sisters”.The late start to procreation may be a big factor in low
overall fertility. At any rate, a paper by Poh Lin Tan of the University of
Singapore notes that a raft of economic incentives offered in Singapore to
parents has failed to stop the continuing drop in fertility there, to 1.16 in
2018. She says that reducing the age of childbearing is the “lowest-hanging fruit” of policymaking.But that requires economic opportunities, says Dr Adserà. This can take the form of a large number of stable jobs, for
example in the public sector, as in the Nordic countries, she says. (Women are
generally over-represented in the public sector.) Or it can take the form of
dynamic job markets, where a job lost is reasonably likely to be replaced,
perhaps by a better one—as in America, Britain or
Australia, which boast higher fertility than southern Europe.But what seems clear is that simple baby bribes—whether they come as one-time bonuses, monthly giveaways or tax
credits—are not enough. More generally, says Frank
Furedi of MCC, a Hungarian-government-funded think-tank, “pro-natalist policies simply don’t work.” The evidence from Poland seems similar; the government there has
run a generous monthly child benefit since 2016, but it has not seen an uptick
in babies born. The best countries can do is make combining work and family
less difficult. As Georgia Meloni’s government
considers new measures for Italy, the political temptation will be to announce “pro-family” policies. But what young couples
really want is job opportunities, support and choice. If all are available,
more of them may use that choice to have more babies. ■
