The population of Spain could fall by more than 10% by 2050 because of the country’s low birth rate and long life expectancy.
The demographic depopulation was set out by the country’s national statistics agency on Thursday which said current trends “will lead to 5.3 million fewer inhabitants”.
People aged over 65 could represent 35% of Spain’s total population in little more than 30 years from now
By the middle of the century, there could be 1.7 million fewer children younger than 10 than are in Spain today.
As a mark of the country’s significant progress, life expectancy in 1900 was just 35 while today it is 80 for men and 85 for women. Until recent times, Spain was known for its large families, but now the fertility rate is only 1.3 births for every woman whose average age for their first child is nearly 32 years.
The agency predicts that in future there will be fewer births overall because fewer women will be of childbearing age. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of the migrants from Latin America, north Africa and parts of Europe left Spain when the financial crisis crippled the country. This, coupled with the large number of Spaniards who have immigrated, will reduce the country’s reproduction possibilities.
Spain is not alone in facing a depopulation prognosis. The birthrate in Portugal has plummeted as it has in every other European nation with the sole exception of France where the rate is 2.1. The only country nudging even close to this is Ireland which has a rate of 1.9.
The projections show that if the current trends continue, the population will fall from about 47 million to 41 million by 2066. By that time, about 60% of households with be either single or two persons.
Antonio Argũeso, of the statistics institute, noted: “These are not so much predictions but references to the way things might evolve. In the 1990s we didn’t think Spain would arrive at a population of 40 million but no one had predicted that 10 years later six million immigrants would arrive and take the population to 47 million.”
Comments