Analysis: how the ageing of Europe will affect the churches

Saturday, 17th May 2008
By Peter Brierley

Europe is in decline! While the population in the other five continents in the world increases, the population of Europe goes down. The United Nations gave the population of the world as 6.09 billion in 2000, and estimates it will be 6.69 billion in mid-2008, a growth of 600 million people worldwide in eight years, equivalent to an increase of 207,000 people every day.

Of the 6.09 world billion in 2000, 481 million were in what are now the 27 countries of the European Union (EU) in 2000, and there will be an estimated 480 million in 2008, a small decline, averaging just 300 people per day. The concern is less that the decline is small, but that the general trend in the population is in the opposite direction from what is happening across the rest of the world. An annual increase in five continents of +0.51 per cent per annum (or one new person for every 200 every year) compares with a decrease of -0.02 per cent in the EU.

The projections made by Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Communities, are that this trend is likely to continue for at least the first quarter of the 21st century. And the figures emphasise how small is the EU compared with the rest of the world, just 7 per cent of the total in 2008, and likely to be 6 per cent by 2025.

Why is Europe so different? In a nut-shell, it is because we have fewer children, but that simple answer is compounded by a number of different factors. Comparable global figures are difficult to obtain because of the paucity of relevant statistics in many developing countries, but one key indicator is the live birth rate – the number of children born each year in a country for every 100 people. In the EU, the live birth rate 2006 was 1.06, whereas in China it was 1.14, in the United States 1.40 and in India 2.34 – the differences may seem small but multiplied across countries with large populations, the impact is considerable. In the UK the live birth rate in 2006 was 1.24. the rest