Eastern Europe has been experiencing population decline for the past few years now with some of the lowest fertility rates in the world, low rates of immigration, and politics that give people reason to leave while they are younger instead of stay and have more children. This is despite pro-natalist policies, expensive programs meant to incentivize having children, being implemented in various parts of the European continent. To give an idea of how depleted some of the countries are of new blood being born within their borders, I want to focus my attention on two relatively impoverished countries: Albania and Belarus. Despite the belief that the fertility rates and birth rates will at least level out, the numbers can always manage to get worse.
Starting out with Albania, the nation reported having about 22,000 births during the entire year of 2023 despite having a population of roughly less than three million people. The issue facing the country is that these birth numbers are completely unsustainable from the perspective of Albania maintaining it’s current population which has shrunk by about 100,000 people in the past decade when birth rates were higher. Because the fertility rates are declining globally and the generations having children are getting older and are less able to have children as they age, the number of children being created is expected to decline over time. However, 22,000 was below “even the most pessimistic expectations” of the Albanian government which had already lowered its expectations which is never a great place for a government to model it’s expectations from.
Contrast this with Belarus, the dictator-ran landlocked country in Eastern Europe where only 65,000 babies were born out of a population of about 9,200,000, roughly the same population distribution situation as the Albania situation. Despite there being low expectations with Belarus being run by a dictatorship, the war in Ukraine spilling over into possible recruitment into the Belarussian Army, etc., the number isn’t as horrendous as other nations have been reporting. Nevertheless, the government in Minsk can’t flip the lower-than-average numbers and say this is a victory by any means without conceding that there is something fundamentally wrong with the dictatorship under Alexander Lukashenko.
These numbers from 2023 may not sound particularly important in the context of world politics, but the birth rates falling in these countries correlates to a slowing economy later as the replacement age workforce is smaller than the cohort of retirees who will be expecting similar retirement benefits to their elders. As financial situations worsen for these countries, one can imagine that the political situation for these countries will worsen as well. Albania is barely removed from the communist dictatorship that governed during the Cold War that kept the country unindustrialized and Belarus already has a dictatorship that is facing internal cracks from both within and from Vladimir Putin wanting to consolidate his political allies around Russia into a recreation of the old Soviet Union. These are the numbers from one bad year of growth: do they continue indefinitely?
Al La (Nuwan Alwis) on X: “@ArseniM @BirthGauge Births in 2023?” / X (twitter.com)
The Conservatarian Millennial 