Germany’s birth rate hits 43-year high in 2016

GERMANY recorded a bounce in the birth rate in 2016, official statistics showed yesterday, hitting a 43-year high helped along by large numbers of recentlyarrived migrants.

Some 792,131 children were born in Europe’s most populous nation in 2016, federal statistics authority Destatis said, up 7 percent over the previous year.

While German women had some 3 percent more babies than in 2015, at 607,500, nonGerman births surged 25 percent, to 184,660.

“The number of women from countries with traditionally higher tendency to bear children increased” following a surge in migration in 2015-16, Destatis said.

Those years saw more than a million people arrive in Germany, many from conflict hotspots in the Middle East such as Syria and Iraq.

Among German mothers, there were more women aged between 30 and 37 in 2016, and women of that age group were more likely to have children under “favorable family policy and economic conditions,” Destatis said.

Long a birth-rate laggard among European countries, the 2016 surge brought the figure in Germany to 1.59 children per woman, around the continentwide average and the highest since 1973.

France boasts the highest birth rate across Europe, at 1.92, while women in Spain and Italy have the fewest children at 1.34.

Higher birth rates in Germany could be good news for the country, as Destatis’ population projections see the ratio of working-age people to over65s falling to just two to one by 2060, compared with around three to one in 2015.