By José Ramón Riera
The pandemic produced in the year 2020 a general reduction in the number of inhabitants in most countries due to its significant mortality rate.
In countries like Spain, the government’s official data were 70,000 dead, while the statistics gave us almost 60,000 more deaths than the Executive published.
This did not happen in the rest of the countries of the European Union, though.
In this small analysis, we wanted to start from the official figures of 2020 and compare them with 2021 and 2022 to see what happened in the European Union and Euro Zone after the pandemic.
In the European Union, we have been losing inhabitants in the last two years compared with 2020, 0.11% in 2021 and 0.04% in 2022, which means losing 656,428 inhabitants in two years.
If we do the same analysis on the countries of the Euro Zone, we have better news, the Euro Zone in 2021 remained flat, but in 2022 it grew by a meager 0.1%, meaning the population in the 20 countries of the Euro Zone grew by 312,193 inhabitants.
In 2020, the EU had 447.5 million inhabitants; in 2022, it had 446.8 million.
The data is worrying because we know that the birth rate in all EU countries is meager, and if these figures have not fallen in a much more worrying way, it has been due to the immigration that has sustained the European population.
On the other hand, we see that France is on fire because President Macron has decided to delay the retirement of the French by two years, to try to avoid the bankruptcy of the pension system in the medium term.
Airef [Spain’s Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility] has just given a tremendous slap on the wrist to the Minister of Social Security for his disastrous reform that he says he will present to Europe without negotiation with the CEOE [Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations] or any other business representative.
According to this independent agency, in a few years, it will lead Spain to have a debt exceeding 150% of its GDP if it wants to continue paying pensions.
One of the big problems of all countries is that although, fortunately, life expectancy has increased, on the other hand, the mass of workers with the capacity to generate sufficient income for the pension system is shrinking.
Soon the sum of public employees, pensioners, and the unemployed, may be higher than the workers of the productive system.
Therefore, more people will be collecting than those who work to support the system.
In short, we are becoming a region of older adults.
We have 17 countries that are growing against ten that are declining.
What happens is that those that are declining do it faster than those that are growing.
The countries that are growing the most in percentage terms are Luxembourg, Ireland, Cyprus, Malta, and Sweden, which are very small.
In absolute values, France is the country that has grown the most, adding 357,051 more inhabitants in 2 years, followed by the Netherlands with 183,087, Sweden with 124,737, Belgium with 108,696, and Spain with 100,191.
Spain is the fifth country in absolute value that contributes the most.
On the other hand, the country that decreased the most is Italy, which has a population decrease of 658,366 inhabitants and is undoubtedly the worst performer in this variable.
Following comes:
- the sixth most important country in the EU, Poland, which decreased by 303,891 inhabitants;
- Romania, which decreased by 290,740 inhabitants;
- Croatia, the new member of the Euro, fell by 179,091 inhabitants;
- and the Czech Republic, although it grew in 2022, it has a loss of 177,232 inhabitants.
The European Commission, chaired by Von der Leyen, is immersed in its 2030 climate Agenda (Green Deal) and in its concern that our food is the healthiest in the world, to the extent that it is willing to make us eat insects rather than worry about the demographic winter that awaits us.
I only know of one country, Hungary, which is implementing very serious and aggressive plans to promote the birth rate, which has lost 80,516 inhabitants in two years, but it seems that in a very short time, it can turn around the birth rate in its country.
The rest of our leaders think that emigration is the solution, forgetting that this can turn around at any time (the crisis of 2008-2014 caused many Colombian emigrants to return to their country of origin) and also needs cultural integration policies to prevent the famous ghettos that socially distort any country.
One only needs to look at France and especially Paris to know this.
Europe and its leaders must include in their plans, and immediately, measures to promote the birth rate and reduce our dependence on emigration in the next 20 years.
With information from LGI