Population & Societies - Is France still a demographic outlier in Europe?

This fol- Despite the recent decline, France still had the highest total lowed a fall in 2020, and a stagnation or only marginal increase fertility rate in the European Union in 2022, and probably also in 2021 and 2022 due to the ongoing impact of the epidemic in 2023 (Figure 1). [...] The shock of the COVID-19 epidemic is Does the decrease in births in 2023 herald a future population visible practically everywhere, with a strongly negative impact decline and more rapid population ageing? In November 2021, on births in December 2020 and January 2021, corresponding INSEE (the French National Institute of Statistics and Econom- to conceptions during the first wave. [...] Under the baseline scenario, fertility remains constant of births in the following months, as was the case in France at 1.8 children per woman, a level close to that of 2020; mortal- (the rebound in Ireland, Belgium and the Czech Republic was ity continues to decline at the same pace as during the 2010s, actually larger than the initial downturn), followed by a with life expectancy at birth reachi. [...] (3) Population estimates for the years 1990 and 2000 and for the years 2016–2020 were adjusted to establish accounting consistency between the 1990, 1999, and 2006 censuses (for 1990 and 2000) and between the censuses of 2016 and the following years for the years 2016–2022 (see [2]). [...] increase will become negative from 2030… Under the 2023 projection up to 2070, the decline in births and the increase in deaths results in a crossing of the two curves in Abstract 2030, the year when natural increase becomes negative (Fig- ure A1 in the online appendix(3)).