The birth rate has dropped significantly. The Czech Republic is gradually dying out, an expert claims

In the Czech Republic, the birth rate dropped significantly last year. According to data from the Czech Statistical Office, an average of one thousand fewer children were born each month than in 2021, when we were at the top of the birth rate in Europe. Then only France overtook us. It is said that the decline could be due to the end of the pandemic, when people no longer spent so much time at home.

Michal and Denisa have a seven-month-old girl Anička. At the age of thirty, it is their first child. They have one more thing planned, they want to do it soon, they say, while they are still young. “Family is important to us, it comes first, so we wanted to make our own,” Denisa revealed.

Anička was conceived the year before last at the end of the pandemic. The pandemic was apparently responsible for the high birth rate in 2021. 111,000 children were born then. “People had more time for each other and spent that time together,” thinks Michal.

It wasn’t so fun last year. Statisticians have not yet published the data for the entire year, but during the first nine months, one thousand fewer children were born in each country. For last year, the birth rate will probably fall below one hundred thousand children.

​”The Czech Republic will gradually die off, because fewer children are born than Czechs die. We probably won’t be able to reverse the trend, the numbers have been getting worse in recent years,” says economist Štěpán Křeček. In a poll by Nova TV, the viewers who were asked confided that they think two children are just right – to have someone to play with and at the same time make it financially viable for the parents.

In what was then Czechoslovakia, the highest birth rate was in 1974, when the so-called Husák children were born. Since then, it has declined very significantly and started to rise only after 2000. The year before last, we were in second place in Europe in terms of birth rate.

Last January, however, the birth rate began to decline almost everywhere. Europe has been dying for a long time, the annual birth rate has dropped by 700 thousand children in 12 years. China is in a similar situation, its one-child policy has driven the country to a state where the number of retirees in the country is growing steeply. Five people work on each of them, ten years ago there were twice as many.

sei, TN.cz