Europe 2017 – What if the demographic future was not gray but rosy
(this article is part of a series of articles intended for publication in Europolitics around Europe in 2017)
Watching the curves of young people and seniors intersect, one plunging gently, the other climbing towards the summits, until reaching the proportion of two assets for one senior (in 2044), the future does not look bright. . However, the “unique scenario” of a dramatic ageing, gradually paralyzing the European economy, must be put into perspective. Two phenomena could, in fact, emerge in certain Member States: one playing in favor of a return of the birth rate, and therefore of growth; the other acting in the opposite direction, with the growing weight of elderly and dependent people, unless their “solvency” makes it an “emerging” market.
Does the return of the birth rate exist?
The commonly accepted scenario of an inexorable deficit in the birth rate is static. Starting from the current birth rate, the model used leads to a rate of 1,6 children per woman in the Europe of the Twenty-five by 2030. This is without taking into account other possible developments, as certain demographers. Fertility is an "open question", for Wolfgang Lutz, director of the Viennese Institute of Demography, who explains that the drop in the birth rate is, in part, due to a postponement of births among women. "This fertility 'tempo' has a significant impact and can be seen as a notable variable." According to the UN, after a decline in the years 2000-2010, the rate would rise to reach 1,85 on average. Countries such as France, Ireland and Sweden have already exceeded this threshold, with a rate close to generational renewal, at 2,1.
This return to the birth rate deserves to be studied because these three countries have, a priori, nothing in common: neither the philosophical background, nor the family and sexual tradition, nor the socio-economic or migration policy, nor the level economic. The demographer Jean-Claude Chesnais distinguishes "three Europe(s) of fertility": the "Atlantic" (France, United Kingdom, Benelux, Nordic countries) with short-term fertility indicators close to generational replacement (1,6 at 1,9); Germany (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) with 1,3 to 1,4 children on average per woman; finally, the "Peripherique" of the South and East with 1,1 to 1,2 children per woman. A division which corresponds "precisely to the public effort deployed in favor of young parents: where social expenditure devoted to childhood is of the order of 1% of GDP or even less (Italy, Spain, Baltic States, Russia) , fertility is the lowest in the world; conversely, where it exceeds 4% of GDP, fertility is in the first category". Could the solution be that simple?
The effectiveness of ongoing policies
To be effective, adds François Héran, director of the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED), a family policy must be "continuous (couples no longer have confidence if the measures last a few years), universal (not aimed only the poorest segments of the population), readable (the range of measures must remain consistent) and be subject to regular evaluations (difficult task…)”. In addition to the financial incentives of the family policy, the levers of a more active birth rate would then be the free availability of certain public goods, such as school from the age of three, full-day schooling or appropriate urban planning. to children. To this list, which could constitute the embryo of an EU family policy, one could add the reconciliation of professional and family life (parental leave, organization of working time, etc.). Three major obstacles reduce fertility: "the obstacles to the emancipation of young people" (access to independent housing, childcare system), unemployment and precariousness and "the rigidity of family structures which limit women's capacity for action Believing that they must be married to have children and must stay at home to raise them are the two pillars of a familialist vision deeply rooted in countries with low fertility.
A youth to employ
If the birth rate picks up again, questions of employment - how to find work for everyone - and training - where to find the means - would (again) become central with questions about the types of employment and training to be promoted. , on the advisability of more "binding" incentives, etc. But globalization will force the Union to broaden its field of reflection. The development of the "high tech" sectors, presented as part of the solution, will clashes with the existence in emerging countries (China, India, etc.) of a workforce trained in the best schools, capable of taking over, or even supplanting, European senior executives. jobs, which cannot be relocated, are more in services to people or the environment, which do not all require higher education N+5 or N+8, but more a psychological or technical approach.
Dependency risk
Whatever the hypotheses, one phenomenon proves to be inevitable: the extension of the population in a dependent situation due to the increase in life expectancy (80-90 years). However, the medico-social reception structures are not adapted either quantitatively or qualitatively to people who will have all their "head" and their "body" but will need an adapted environment (residences, etc.). The problem will be all the more acute in the years 2030-2050 as the generations concerned will have less financial means, with the fall in pensions, than those of the years 2010-2020. It will also remain to consider the questions, essentially of public finance, that will arise from the expected exodus of a large minority of retirees of Nordic origin (Germany, United Kingdom, Scandinavian countries) to the South (Spain, Italy, and possibly Romania and Bulgaria) of the Union.
(NGV)
