Written by Why Germany’s birth rate is rising and Italy’s isn’t
| POTSDAM
Excerpt:
In 1907 an anxious Austrian, Emil Reich, predicted that Germany would have a population of 150m in 1980 and as many as 200m by the year 2000. It seemed plausible at the time. Germany had a high birth rate and a falling mortality rate. Reich’s prediction, in his book “Germany’s Swelled Head”, turned out to be completely wrong. By the early 1980s East and West Germany had a combined fertility rate lower than anywhere in the world except Denmark and the Channel Islands. Far from exploding, Germany’s population seemed doomed to rapid decline.
But in the past few years something unexpected has happened. The fertility rate, an estimate of the number of children each woman can expect to have in her lifetime, has climbed off the floor.
