Fears of an aging Europe

Today’s FT has a long article titled (Fewer births make old Europe fear for its future). Sorry, but to read this you need to have FT subscription.

The tenor of the article is that “shrinking population is a bad thing”. Other than the huge problems of financing pensions and healthcare (and it is a BIG problem, certainly during the transition period to a smaller population) it is not obvious to me that having less people about is such a bad thing. Of course from a marketing perspective it means fewer customers.

Apparently Japan has real problems. “Japan's birth rate is falling much faster than previously expected, raising concerns about the impact that the low number of births will have on the country's future economic vitality. The average number of children a woman will have during her lifetime has dropped from 1.32 in 2002 to 1.29. This is a much faster decline than the government had been expecting and is bound to affect Japan's newly enacted controversial pension scheme, which is based on a fertility rate of 1.39.”
Because of the language difficulties it is going to be hard for Japan to use immigration as a means of increasing these numbers.

Europe has little to fear since the EU has now decided to focus its bureaucratic might on the problem. Odile Quintin, director-general of employment and social affairs at the European Commission, says: "We don't have a fertility policy at the European Union level, but we are beginning to address the effects of low fertility." The mind boggles at what a EU fertility policy would look like should they ever develop one. Let’s hope we never find out. Dick Stroud: www.20plus30.com