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<title> WHY IS THE BIRTH-RATE DECREASING IN WESTERN EUROPE? </title>
The birth-rate in Western Europe (WE) is decreasing, according to several recent articles in Swedish newspapers. Today, the average woman within EU has 1,5 child; the number needed to keep the population stable is 2,1. Many politicians express anxiety that the working population will not be able to support the many elderly. The causes for this are worth analysing, and there are numerous causes, but I will take up the most important ones.

There is one answer to be found on the labour market. Only twenty years ago, it was possible to start at a low level within a work place and then "climb your way up", but in many cases, job seekers nowadays have to have finished college. This makes more people enter higher education, thus delaying their professional career and possible childbirth. It is plausible that when you have finally finished your education and got a well-paid job, you want to dedicate some years to it, and the interruption that childbirth brings is inconvenient. So could it be that the birth-rate is just "delayed" for five to ten years, since these work conditions have appeared quite recently, and young people need to adapt to them? A proof of that is that women nowadays often are over thirty when they have their first child (31 is the average age for first-time mothers in inner Stockholm, 27 in the rest of the country). The demands on the labour market are likely to get even higher, and that together with other causes indicate that the low birth-rate is not really a temporary trend.

The private and national economy is very important for the birth-rate. If allowances and benefits aimed at families are withdrawn, the number of births goes down accordingly. This was the case in Sweden in 1995, when several benefits had to be taken away because of the economic recession, and the birth-rates have been decreasing since then, sinking to 9,1 in Italy, the lowest in WE, and 9,9 in Sweden. Even though the economy has been strong for a couple of years now, and families have their (even increased) benefits back, the trend does not turn. In France, for example, great progress has been made in parental conditions - day-care centres at work places, free day-care, and allowances for domestic help, but without any results. It could be that Europe has not quite recovered from the depression - the case with Norway supports this theory. Norway was never seriously struck by the economic recession like the rest of Europe, and their birth rate is 13,3 per 1000 inhabitants. We could look at developing countries, on the other hand, with their constantly high birth-rates regardless of economical instability. The difference between developing countries and WE is social reforms, and thus we could assume that those have a considerable impact on the birth-rates. 

Probably the most important of these social factors is women's liberation. Focusing on women's conditions in WE could be the key to analysing the birth-rate, since women's situation has changed the most dramatically during the last fifty years, not men's. It is not an appropriate explanation to the latest decrease in population, starting 1995 - it has to be seen in a larger time span, and then it is clear that this trend has been going on for at least during a hundred years (1750, the average Swedish woman had 5 children, 1934 she had 1,7, in 1999, 1,5). Two results of the women's liberation movement that have had impact on the birth-rate are birth control and women's entering the labour market. The latter has been going on since World War II, but it is only recently that as many women as men work full time. Birth control is also significant; a Catholic country like Ireland, where abortion is prohibited, heads the birth-rate list in Western Europe with 14,3 per 1000 inhabitants.

There is obviously not one cause for the low birth-rate in WE. The causes that I have chosen here are linked together in a way - if society and people's lifestyle had not changed, the demands of the job market would look different. If there were better opportunities to both work and take care of children, people would probably not hesitate as much. If politics allowed a family to live on one income, women would not work, and if they did not, they would have less reason for delaying childbirth. 

The economic conditions are easy to survey and generally taken to be the most convincing cause. People's attitudes, and women's attitudes to career and family life in particular, are not as easy to survey, but I think that is what really has changed the most. The fact that this trend has been going on for a long time indicates that the birth-rate will continue to decrease.
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