New figures released on Wednesday show that the years-long trend of women in Germany ending up childless has come to an end, with even university-educated women bringing more babies into the world.
The latest government figures reveal that Germany has reached its highest fertility rate since the country came back together at the end of the Cold War in 1990. But the Bundesrepublik still lags behind much of Europe.
As Germans live longer and lower birth rates mean fewer workers are available to replace retirees, the Bundesbank says people will need to work longer in order to meet pension demands.
The German population rose by almost half a million in 2014, the biggest increase in almost a quarter century, the Federal Office of Statistics (destatis) reported on Thursday.
If low birth rates and high death rates continue as they are now, a major decline in Germany’s population is “inevitable,” the federal statistics office (Destatis) reported on Tuesday.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives are trumpeting an electoral pledge to bump up child benefits but admit that the power of their family policy to boost the low birthrate that could take the shine off the German economy is limited.
Since radioactive waste started being transported to a nuclear waste facility in Lower Saxony, fewer girls have been born in the region – a phenomenon eerily similar to what happened after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, scientists said.
Germany's population will plunge by 17 million inhabitants – a fifth of its current size – by 2060, according to a demography study presented by Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich this week.
The birthrate in Germany climbed last year to its highest in more than two decades, but the number of children being born in the country per woman remains one of the lowest in Europe.
Germany’s birth rate is rising faster than it has in a decade, with 18,000 more babies born between January and September than the same period last year, government figures show.
Germany currently has the largest population in Europe, but by 2060 the head count in both France and Britain will have exceeded this number, according to a new study by the EU's statistical office, Eurostat.
