Europe Faces Crisis of Aging

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Europe Faces Crisis of Aging
Study: Fewer children born

By Robert Cooke

Newsday com., March 28, 2003

When U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently disparaged France and Germany as "Old Europe," maybe he was speaking demographically.

According to a new study of the European Union's 15 member nations, governments there are facing an age problem that is almost certain to get worse. European families are having fewer children, and are exacerbating the problem by delaying child-bearing.

As a result, the research team said, Europeans face higher health and welfare costs, fewer wage-earners, and an impact on national productivity. In other words, a downward spiral has begun, and soon fewer young workers will be supporting more and more old retirees.

Although their calculations predict a slight population rise over the next 15 years - the result of a "baby boom" in the 1960s - the researchers see Europe having 88 million fewer people when the year 2100 rolls around, down from about 230 million.

One of the researchers, Brian O'Neill at Brown University in Providence, said the data show "there are fewer children today than there are parents" in the European Union. "So we know the number of parents one generation in the future is going to be even smaller.

"Then there is the additional factor of [childbearing] delay," which accounts for about 40 percent of the expected decline.

At present, Europe has about four working-age persons for every elderly person, the researchers said. But they predict there "will be considerably less than three" workers per retiree for most of this century, even if young families begin having children sooner. If families continue to delay child-bearing, "the support ratio would further decline to almost two, nearly doubling the demographic dependence."

"Negative [population] momentum has not been experienced on a large scale in world history so far," said Wolfgang Lutz, lead author of the report in today's issue of Science. "It is now like sailing against a current running toward population shrinkage and aging."

"Europe has just entered a critical phase of its demographic evolution," the researchers reported. The current birth rate is 1.5 births per woman.

In fact, "for the 15 member countries of the European Union, low fertility brought the population to the turning point - from positive to negative momentum - around the year 2000," the researchers found.

The big uncertainty is the issue of migration. The team focused on what today's numbers mean only in terms of fertility and age structure.

As for immigration, "in the real world," O'Neill added, "there may be enough immigration to offset that tendency" toward population decline. "But it's going to be an uphill battle" to keep European economies strong.

He also described immigration as "the one demographic factor that is hardest to predict, since it depends so strongly on policy. If you let more people in, or less people in, that can have a substantial impact on population aging."