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The collapse of communism in 1989 produced a sharp drop in the fertility rate throughout Eastern and Central Europe that could reduce the region’s population nearly 20 percent by the year 2050, according to a United Nations report issued today.

With political collapse and economic uncertainty, many women almost immediately stopped having children or decided to delay motherhood, according to the report by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, part of a larger economic survey of Europe.

And in more developed countries, the transition to capitalism has produced new economic opportunities for both women and men, making early childbearing less common.

A result will be a smaller labor pool and a quickly aging population, said Miroslav Macura, the chief of the population unit that prepared the report. With the rise in emigration and at least temporary increases in mortality rates in large parts of the region, which includes Russia and the European parts of the former Soviet Union, he said, a population of some 307 million could fall to about 250 million in the next 50 years.

With the fall of Communism, real incomes have declined in the region and are only slowly recovering, with larger gaps between rich and poor.

At the same time, governments have cut support for families with children, while services like day care centers have become private or more expensive.

“People have been impoverished and decided that having kids at a time of poverty and misery is not the right thing to do, so they cut back”, Mr. Macura said in a telephone interview from Geneva. ‘This is family downsizing comparable to company downsizing.”

Western Europe is also facing reductions in the fertility rate –which measures the average number of children born to women of childbearing age – and an aging population, which is raising the prospect of an economy without enough young, skilled workers to grow and pay for the rising number of pensioners. The answer is likely to be more immigration from Central and Eastern Europe, which may create new political problems in Western Europe and further diminish the skilled work force the east.

In Eastern and Central Europe, the decline in childbearing is much sharper than in the West. When a population has a fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman, it replaces itself, Mr. Macura said. But by 1997, the average fertility rate in the transition economies was 1.37, a third lower than in 1988. In the market economies of Western Europe, by contrast, the average rate was 1.58.

The rate fell most sharply after 1989 in the former East Germany, where in 1993 the rate has dropped to 0.76. By 1998, it had improved to 1.06, rising to a figure still smaller than both Latvia and Bulgaria, whose rates had fallen to 1.09 and 1.11 respectively.

The more prosperous countries of Central Europe will make up some of their population decrease from new immigration that will come from even poorer countries to their east, suggested Tomas Kucera, a professor of demographics at Charles University in Prague.

He also said that the large generation born in the early 1970’s, which is currently postponing motherhood, is likely not to postpone it forever, especially as economies stabilize. But they will have fewer children, often no more than one.

“Fertility will never again reach pre-1989 levels”, Mr. Kucera said. He suggests that in Russia and many of the poorer states, a smaller labor force will help. But he concedes that paying for the benefits and illnesses of an aging population will be difficult, and that some countries, like Russia, will see a sharp decline in its population as a strategic threat to its influence and power.

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