He INE just published the Basic demographic results for Spain in 2011. In them you can see that the number of births decreased by 3.5% during the year 2011 compared to 2010, with a Mean maternity age up to 31.4 years. Also the average number of children per woman decreased to 1.35. To compensate, life expectancy at birth reached 79.1 years in men and 84.9 years in women.
In the INE data it is indicated that the birth rate maintains a decrease that began in 2009. Thus, in 2011 there were 468,430 births of mothers residing in Spain, 3.5% less than in the previous year. This impacts the call. replacement rate that with the decrease to 1.35 children per woman places us well below the necessary 2.1 for society to ensure generational relief. As the deaths were 387,347 in 2011 the vegetative growth of the Spanish population, the net between births and deaths, was 81,083 people. The possibility that this value is soon negative is already contemplated.
A total of 90,390 births, almost 20%, were from mothers of foreign nationality residing in Spain. Among Spanish women, the average number of children per woman was 1.31. Among foreigners, it stood at 1.56.
We will have to do something in Spain, and probably in Europe that has similar figures, to ensure that demography, which is incontestable and definitive to understand the future, changes the trend. Although it seems that We are going to meet soon with an aging, conservative society, without innovation or entrepreneurship and with a migratory movement of growing talent that will make us less productive in Spain.
Perhaps the future trend can be changed although it seems to me that some of the measures that have been taken have not yielded the expected results. In Spain, many financial assistance is not offered to families so that they have children, and work and family reconciliation is also difficult. Perhaps with a crisis like the current one, new, original, drastic decisions can be made and I dare to say that unpopular, although perhaps they can contribute to returning us to growth rates such as those of past years.
