![]() ![]() ‘Ageing also means having fewer and fewer younger people around.’ ![]() ‘Ageing doesn’t just mean having an increasing share of the elderly,’ said Vignoli. In 2022, more than half of Europe’s population was older than 44.4 years and more than a fifth was over 65. These figures are below what demographers term “replacement level” – the average number of births required to keep the population size stable in the absence of migration. In Italy, the average age at which women have their first child is 31.6 years – among the oldest in Europe. ![]() Today they have 1.25, below the EU average of 1.53. In the 1960s, Italians had 2.4 children on average. Called EU-FER, the six-year initiative is due to wrap up in August 2023.Īngst about the future is causing more and more people in Europe to delay having a child or to decide against having any at all, according to Vignoli. He leads a project that received EU funding to explore how fertility across Europe is changing and being shaped by multiple anxieties in people. ‘Our results showed very clearly that fertility is affected by uncertain narratives of the future,’ said Vignoli, a professor of demography at the University of Florence in Italy. Others described an increase in general anxieties about the state of the world. Some of the 1 600 participants told him that their own economic difficulties – specifically a lack of work or access to housing – meant they felt unable to have a child. His aim was to explore how negative media coverage might be affecting people’s choices about when, or whether, to have a baby. In an experiment that Vignoli conducted in Italy and Norway in 2019, he showed a total of 800 couples in their 20s and 30s newspaper headlines about the economy. When demography expert Daniele Vignoli asked young couples for their thoughts about having children, a theme emerged: uncertainty about the future. As Europe’s population ages, understanding the causes of declining birth rates becomes more important. ![]()
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