OSLO: “Norway needs more children! I don’t think I need to tell anyone how this is done,” Norway’s prime minister said cheekily, but she was raising a real concern.
Too few babies are being born in the Nordic region.
The Nordic countries were long a bastion of strong fertility rates on an Old Continent that is rapidly getting older. But they are now experiencing a decline that threatens their cherished welfare model, which is funded by taxpayers.
“In the coming decades, we will encounter problems with this model,” Prime Minister Erna Solberg warned Norwegians in her New Year’s speech.
“There will be fewer young people to bear the increasingly heavy burden of the welfare state.” In Norway, Finland and Iceland, birth rates dropped to historic lows in 2017, with 1.49 to 1.71 children born per woman. Just a few years earlier, their birth rates hovered close to the 2.1 level required for their populations to remain stable.
“In all of the Nordic countries, birth rates started dropping in the years after the 2008 financial crisis,” University of Oslo sociologist Trude Lappegard said.
“The crisis is over now but it’s still falling.” From Copenhagen to the North Cape, from Helsinki to Reykjavik, demographics across the Nordics reveal two things: there are fewer large families, and women are waiting longer before having their first child.
There’s no single explanation, but financial uncertainty and a sharp rise in housing costs are seen as likely factors. In the long term, this means there will be fewer people of working age to pay taxes that fund the generous state welfare systems.
These systems pay for, among other things, lengthy parental leaves, which in Sweden can last up to 480 days.
Experts present differing diagnoses and prescriptions to remedy the situation. In Norway, one economist concerned about the effect the slowing demographics will have on economic growth has suggested giving women 500,000 kroner (50,000 euros, $58,550) in pension savings for each child born.
Another has suggested that, on the contrary, women in Norway who reach the age of 50 without having had a child should be paid one million kroner, since children also cost society a lot. — AFP
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