Yesterday’s truth, today’s embarrassment? A year ago, the government justified pension reform by the need to adapt our pay-as-you-go model to an “economic and demographic context” which continues to weaken it. Emmanuel Macron even gave a televised text explanation in March on “this demographic situation that is ours”: ever more retirees, who live longer, and too few active people, who are increasingly entering later in professional life.
During the discussions preceding the adoption, just as laborious, of the immigration law on December 19, the executive was careful, this time, to invoke the statistics that it brandished nine months earlier. Only Patrick Martin, on behalf of Medef, had the guts – although belatedly – to put the subject on the table: on the morning of the vote, on Radio Classique, the boss of bosses estimated that “from here by 2050, we will need, unless we reinvent our social model, unless we reinvent our economic model, 3.9 million foreign employees.”
Births at their lowest over four consecutive quarters
Returning to the major dynamics at work in the country, in terms of birth rate, mortality and migratory flows, the latest issue of the magazine Populationpublished a few days ago by the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED), allows us to establish some useful milestones in this largely overlooked debate.
As of January 1, 2023, the estimated population of France was 68.04 million inhabitants, 200,000 more than a year earlier. The natural balance – the difference between the number of births (723,000) and deaths (667,000) – remained slightly positive (+56,000) in 2022. In absolute value, it places France at the top of European states. But this volume is the lowest recorded in the country since the post-war period. And compared to the population, it is significantly less important than in Ireland, Sweden, Luxembourg or Cyprus.
Over the last two quarters of 2022 and the first two of 2023, the number of births in France even reached an unprecedented low. This is due to high inflation, which may have affected the living conditions of households, and to the uncertainties linked to the war in Ukraine, analyzes INED. As for the effects of the climate crisis, they remain difficult to measure on births, unlike deaths which peak during summer heatwaves.
In 2022, the total fertility index – 1.796 children per woman of childbearing age – is also on a downward trend: it was 1.893 five years earlier. Here again, despite this decline, this index remains the highest among European countries. But to measure the renewal, or not, of a population, another indicator should be observed: the final descent of a generation. In other words, the sum of fertility rates recorded between ages 18 and 50 by women born in the same year. In the 1972 generation, the last for which the final calculation is possible, this rate amounts to 1.99 children per woman, a level very close to the population renewal threshold. However, even if it remains in the leading group, France is ahead of Iceland, Ireland or Norway, and is on a par with Denmark or Sweden.
What will it be like for subsequent generations? INED does not risk playing the game of predictions, as the evolution of the desire for children, possible family policy measures or economic, social and climatic conditions are difficult to anticipate. The Institute specifies, however, that the fertility of generations in Europe “will almost certainly be lower than the renewal threshold in the vast majority of countries with regard to the fertility reached at age 30, from 11% to 44% lower in the 1991 generation than in the 1972 generation.” There is no reason why France should escape the phenomenon.
Demographic growth: France in 18th place out of 27
Alongside the natural balance between births and deaths, the migration balance – the difference between the number of immigrants and emigrants – constitutes the other lever for growing a population. In 2022, it will rise to 4 million people in the European Union. A record figure, which brought the population of the 27 member countries to 448 million inhabitants, more than offsetting the negative natural balance of the EU (-1.3 million). The reasons are known: the lifting of post-Covid movement restrictions was compounded by the crises in Ukraine, Syria and Afghanistan. Alone, according to figures recorded by Eurostat, Germany welcomed more than 1.4 million additional immigrants, Spain 700,000, Czechia 330,000, Portugal 156,000… while France did not recorded only 142,000. This is more or less the same level as Austria, which has a total population that is eight times lower.
In the end, by combining natural balance and migratory balance, the French population increased in 2022 by 2.9 people per 1,000, according to Eurostat, or two times less than the average for the entire European Union. From the point of view of demographic growth, France only occupies a modest 18th place out of 27. For the first time in its history, those aged 75 and over represent, finally, more than 10% of the inhabitants. , compared to 7.6% in 2003.
Slowdown and aging of its population, these are the challenges that France, its economy and its social protection system, will face in the years to come. An implacable observation which should call for a coordinated response from public action, both in terms of pension systems and that of the labor market. By going in different directions, the two emblematic laws of Macron’s second five-year term have not shown the way to this coherence.
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