Sep. 11, 2007 - Issue #621: Sex in The City 07
Dyer Straight
Social programs give France's "birth-giving machines" the bug
“The number of women aged between 15 and 50 is fixed,” explained Japanese Health Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa in a speech in Matsue City in January. “Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask for is for them to do their best per head.” Then he paused a moment and hastily added: “Although it may not be so appropriate to call them machines.”Indeed. But he wasn’t just rude; he was also wrong. Governments can affect the birth rate. More babies were born in France in 2006 than in any other year for the past quarter-century—830 000 of them, in fact. The fertility rate, which has been rising for years, is now up to two babies per woman, and at the rate it is currently rising will reach the “replacement rate” of 2.1 next year. Compared to Japan’s incredibly low 1.26 babies per woman, it is a veritable baby boom, but even within Europe the French birth rate is only exceeded by the Irish.
Japan and France had roughly similar demographic trends after the Second World War. First came the “baby boom,” as a result of which Japan’s population grew from 75 million to the current 127 million and France’s went from 40 million to 63 million. But by the 1990s both countries’ birth rates had dropped below replacement level, and in the long run that means the actual population begins to shrink. Japan’s population duly started down again in 2004. By 2050, it is predicted to be only 90 million.
This is quite normal in the developed world, where among the larger countries only the United States still has a growing population (and that mostly thanks to immigration). Japan’s population is falling faster than most, but Italy and Russia are falling just as fast. Yet the French birth rate, which was following the same pattern, suddenly turned around in 1996 and started going up again.
What are they doing right? “The deciding factor (is) that it is
easier to reconcile professional activity and a family life here than in most
other European countries,” suggested Jean-Michel Charpin, director of
the national statistics agency Insee.
The dates do more or less match up. France’s unusually family-friendly
policies, like universally affordable day care and generous parental leave,
were launched in the early 1990s under then-Families Minister and recent
presidential candidate Segolene Royal—and only a few years later, the
birth rate started to recover.
Even the racists in the National Front do not oppose these policies, because
every ethnic group has responded in the same way to these incentives: the
fertility rate among France’s immigrant population is only slightly
higher than that of the population at large. If current trends—a
declining population in Germany and a slowly rising population in
France—persist, then by 2050 France will have the second-largest
population in Europe, behind only Russia.
Others are beginning to notice the French success, and Russia most of all.
Russia had 150 million people when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, but
it’s already down to 143 million, and at the moment it is shrinking by
700 000 people every year. This has been causing something close to panic in
the Kremlin, where they see the increasingly empty spaces of Siberia and the
Russian Far East as a standing temptation to an overcrowded China. (That may
be paranoid, but you hear it in Moscow all the time.)
“The most acute problem in modern-day Russia is demography,” said
President Vladimir Putin last May, and announced measures even more sweeping
than those in France to get the birth rate up. Starting this month, Russian
women who give birth to a second child will get an immediate cash bonus of
250 000 roubles ($9500). That’s a small fortune in an economy where the
minimum wage is just over $300 a month.
At the same time Putin doubled the state benefit for a first child to $55 a
month, while women who have a second child will get an extra $110 a month
plus financial help with child care. Have three children, and you will get
close to the minimum wage without working at all. That should be enough to
stabilize the population.
Not that the world actually needs more Russians or French or Japanese, of
course. There are already ten times as many of them (and of everybody else)
as there were five hundred years ago, and that’s probably already more
than the planet can bear over the long run. V
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. His column appears regularly in Vue Weekly.
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