Report: Baby Boom Will Push France Ahead of Germany

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Report: Baby Boom Will Push France Ahead of Germany

According to a new study, Germany is set to concede its lead as Europe's largest economy to France by the mid 21st century. The reason? The country's declining birth-rate.

Family policy is topping the political agenda in Berlin once again, after German Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen sparked controversy within the ranks of her own Christian Democrat party (CDU) with proposals to make it easier for women to combine careers and family responsibilities.

Her push to create more day-care facilities for the under-threes has drawn harsh criticism from conservatives who accuse von der Leyen of undermining conservative family values.

Others say the time has come to wake up to the realities of a changing world, and a new study carried out by the Institute for German Economics (IW) provides more evidence that Germany's failure to encourage women to start families has serious long-term repercussions for the economy.

While Germany's population decline is currently irreversible, France is seeing a population boost -- and if demographic predictions prove correct, this will put France well on track to become the continent's strongest economy by 2035.

According to the experts, the discrepancy between German and French economic clout will become particularly acute between 2025 and 2035.

"The French economy will grow twice as fast as the German one in these years," IW expert Axel Plünnecke told the weekly Die Welt. This is when Germany's "baby-boomer" generation will reach retirement age and the country will start feeling the pinch of its ageing population and declining birth rate.

"The shortfall in the work-place will put a brake on the economy," Plünnecke said.

To many, the development is an obvious return on the French government's family-friendly policies.

Since 2000, France has seen more births than Germany even though it has some 21 million fewer inhabitants. Last year, France registered 831,000 births compared to 675,000 in Germany, making it one of the most fertile countries in Europe.

This robust reproduction rate is officially encouraged by government programs, including three-year paid parental leave with guaranteed job protection upon returning to the workforce; full-time pre-school starting at age three; subsidized day-care for the under-threes; stipends for in-home nannies and monthly child-care allowances that increase with the number of children per family.

Germany, meanwhile, is still mired in a debate about whether women should be encouraged to work or encouraged to stay at home, with critics maintaining that von der Leyen's recent proposals create a false image that only women who go out to work are modern.

"If you want to give women the chance to work and have children too, you have to provide day care," said CDU parliamentary chief, Volker Kauder. "But I want to emphasize that parents who stay home with their kids from birth until the age of three should not be regarded as belonging to the last century."

 

[madkins]

Another excellent post -88-. It's long past time German politicans started helping German families!

Skara Brae

 

[veritas1616]

I wonder how much of the French growth is due to muslim immigrants having six or seven children?

 

[Rasp]

Germany -- Population: 82,422,299 (July 2006 est.)

Ethnic groups: German 91.5%, Turkish 2.4%, other 6.1% (made up largely of Greek, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish); [Muslim 3.7%]

France -- Population: total: 62,752,136 (July 2006 est.)

Celtic and Latin with Teutonic, Slavic, North African, Indochinese, Basque minorities; [Muslim 5%-10%]

 

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Germany's World Cup Baby Boom

Last summer's mix of sun, beer and excitement during the football World Cup appears to have produced a massive hormone rush in German bedrooms, gardens and back alleys. Nine months on, birth clinics across the country that hosted the tournament are reporting a much-needed baby boom.

The football World Cup from June 9 to July 9 last year appears to have sparked a baby boom in the host country Germany, where hospitals are reporting a marked rise in imminent births nine months after the tournament, remembered here as a month-long fairy-tale of sunshine, parties and soccer success.

The head of the largest birth clinic in the city of Kassel, Rolf Kliche, estimates that births at his hospital will be up by 10 to 15 percent, which he described as a "minor sensation" given the usually stable birth statistics.

Kliche said he wasn't surprised because happiness tends to release hormones and makes it easier to get pregnant. "With many people the excitement they felt during the matches seems to have lasted and been employed in other ways after the final whistle," he told Hessicher Rundfunk radio.

Other hospitals around Germany are reporting increased bookings for ante-natal classes although many are predicting the increase will be smaller than 15 percent.

Pia Schmidt from Verna had been trying to get pregnant for two years and reckons that Germany's 1-0 victory over Poland, a nail-biting encounter decided in injury time, cracked it. "I can remember it exactly," Pia, 27, told Hessischer Rundfunk. "We had a barbecue, had invited friends and everyone was in a good mood." Her husband Sascha said: "And when Germany won, my wife and I went on celebrating after the game."

Their daughter Farina was born five weeks early on February 11 and has been celebrated as Germany's first World Cup baby. The others are due to follow from the end of February onwards.

It's good news for Germany, whose birth rate at 1.36 children per woman is below the European Union average of 1.52.

 

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Ursula von der Leyen

Is Germany Turning Women into "Breeding Machines"?

Germany is debating how to boost its birth rate, and a proposal to expand public daycare by Ursula von der Leyen -- the conservative family affairs minister who is herself a mother of seven -- has enraged a bishop. The center-left Social Democrats are also nervous.

Germany hosts the World Cup only every few decades, so the minor baby boom resulting from last summer's soccer tournament will remain a one-off. The country's birth rate is still below the European Union average, and the question of how to boost it has fanned an old debate about how much the state can and should do to encourage women to become mothers.

Catholic bishop of
Augsburg, Walter Mixa

Conservative Family Affairs Minister Ursula von der Leyen, a mother of seven, has drafted a plan to sharply increase the number of daycare spots for children aged three and under. But the proposal has met with fierce criticism from the Catholic bishop of Augsburg, Walter Mixa, who said the move would hurt children and reduce women to the status of "breeding machines."

The issue is a battleground between the conservatives and center-left Social Democrats in Chancellor Angela Merkel's grand coalition. The Social Democrats, trailing in opinion polls, worry that Merkel's conservatives are outflanking them on the left with a recent push to help working mothers. Leyen herself spearheaded the introduction of new parental benefits this January -- cash payments to women who take time off work to have a child -- and newspapers see the debate as a potentially decisive shift in Germany's political sands.

The Financial Times Deutschland writes:

"There's a race going on in the grand coalition: Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the child-friendliest party of them all? The SPD made a big mistake when it left the 'soft' Federal Ministry for Family Affairs to its coalition partner, which is now reaching deep into voter groups that had long appeared to belong to the SPD.

"The excessive criticism of Bishop Mixa can only help the CDU ... Not even von der Leyen's opponents want to agree with what he said."

The conservative Die Welt writes:

"Family policy has moved from the periphery back into the center of political debate. SPD parliamentary group leader Peter Struck, by demonstratively claiming his party's leadership on this issue, has shown how nervous the party is. Or rather: How nervous Ursula von der Leyen is making it."

The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

"Now that church leaders have taken up their positions in the row over family policy, the debate about increasing child care facilities is threatening to become an issue of faith. It shouldn't, because the facts are far ahead of the arguments. What families (let alone single-parent families) living in one of Germany's conurbations can still survive on a single income?

"This is not about faith but about finding pragmatic solutions to the everyday problems of many parents."

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"This could become a protracted conflict that lasts until the next general election. The conservatives are setting the agenda right now. In Ursula von der Leyen they have a successful minister who is prepared to defy bishops. The mother of seven is a living example of how child and career can be combined. Von der Leyen is dusting off the conservative image of the family. The conservatives need such role models to become electable for young women in big cities. The SPD has recognized this as a danger, but there is little it can do."