PARIS, April 4 (UPI) -- The Germans are going to have to be very much more generous with the Irish, and probably with the French, the British and the Swedes as well. The demographic future of the 27-nation European Union depends on them.
Much of the focus on Europe over the past 18 month has been on the PIGS -- the rude acronym for the heavily indebted countries of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain -- and their need for German-backed bailouts. Now is it time to start thinking about the FIBS, because the much higher birthrates of the French and Irish and Brits and Swedes means that Europe's future will depend heavily upon them.
The latest report on Europe's demography from Eurostat, the EU's official statistical arm, emphasizes the sharp contrasts in fertility between the FIBS and the rest. It also stresses a generalized pattern of aging and greater longevity that has life expectancy increasing by an average 10 weeks every year.
In 2009, the EU members with the highest fertility rates were Ireland (2.07), France (2.00), the United Kingdom (1.96 in 2008) and Sweden (1.94), all approaching the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. The lowest rates were observed in Latvia (1.31), Hungary and Portugal (both 1.32) and Germany (1.36).
The means that the German population is likely to shrink by as much as one-third over the next 50 years, even while the costs of pensions and healthcare for the large number of elderly Germans has to be financed by a steadily shrinking number of Germans of working age.
At its simplest, that means that the current economic structure of Europe, which depends heavily on Germany as the strongest economy, will become less and less sustainable. The British and the French, the next two strongest economies that also have high birthrates, are likely to replace Germany as the main buttresses of the European economy.
But even the FIBS will face daunting fiscal challenges in providing healthcare and pensions for the elderly. Rising longevity affects everybody, not least the manufacturers and retailers who are beginning to understand that the fastest growing consumer group for the rest of this century will be those over the age of 60.
Over the last 50 years, life expectancy at birth in the EU27 has increased by around 10 years for both women and men, to reach 82.4 years for women and 76.4 years for men in 2008. The life expectancy at birth rose in all member states, with the largest increases for both women and men recorded in Estonia and Slovenia.
In 2009, the highest life expectancies at birth for women were observed in France (85.1), Spain (84.9), Italy (84.5 in 2008) and Cyprus (83.6) and for men in Sweden (79.4), Italy (79.1 in 2008), Spain and the Netherlands (both 78.7).
A number of major corporations, including Nestle, Glaxo Smith Klein, Intel, General Electric, Danone and Philips, are conducting research and development into the needs of older consumers, from nutritional needs to shopping habits, from the impact of reduced mobility to retirement plans.
Companies are also becoming aware of the likely impact on their workforce, with the number of elderly workers likely to grow sharply while fewer young people will be available for the labor force of the future. In the United States, for example, the number of full-time male employees over the age of 65 has doubled from 1.7 million to 3.5 million in the last 20 years.
Among women in the United States, the number of those over 65 in full-time employment has doubled in the last decade, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million. And the number of those over the age of 75 in full-time work has jumped from half a million in 1991 to 1.2 million last year.
In Europe as in the United States, the work force of the future is likely to depend heavily on immigration, which for the past 20 years in Europe has been the main driver behind population growth in most member states: from 2004-08, 3 million to 4 million immigrants settled in the EU each year.
In 2010, a breakdown of the EU population by citizenship showed that there were 32.4 million foreigners living in the 27 member states (6.5 percent of the total population). Of those, 12.3 million were EU nationals living in another member state and 20.1 million were citizens from a non-EU country.
In 2010, the largest numbers of foreign citizens were recorded in Germany (7.1 million), Spain (5.7 million), the United Kingdom (4.4 million), Italy (4.2 million) and France (3.8 million). Almost 80 percent of the foreign citizens in the EU lived in these five member states.
It can be dangerous to extrapolate too many predictions for the future from recent birthrates because birthrates can change and new diseases or viruses or negative health trends like the surge in diabetes can reduce longevity. Above all, governments can and do use the tax system to reward families with more children. Children are expensive. A report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture reckoned that it will cost middle-income families $286,050 to raise a child born in 2009.
There is some evidence of this in the Eurostat data and the higher Swedish birthrates seem linked to generous provisions for women with children. After falling sharply between 1980 and the early 2000s, the fertility rate in the EU as a whole started to increase again in 2003, when it stood at 1.47 children per woman, to reach a level of 1.60 in 2008. But this is still far below the replacement rate of 2.1 children.
