Sudden drop in German births - Part 2

A tale of two lands and one city

Destatis (German Federal Agency for Statistics) has released new births data including April 2022 and has also sent me the breakdown of the birth order. Skip to the end if you want to see my immediate reaction.

I won’t finish processing the new data until tomorrow (Destatis website seems to be down at the moment). Here is what I had so far..

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I was rummaging around the website of the German Federal Agency for new insights again, and while I couldn’t find exactly the data I am seeking I thought I might still have some tentative confirmation for my The Wedding Crasher theory. The graphic below is from a press release last year in November. Recall, in my previous post I wrote:

I am also beginning to suspect that the birth figures in 2021 may have been padded by an increase in lockdown babies - i.e. 2nd, 3rd births, etc. within existing relationships, which in effect may have hidden an earlier drop in firstborns than the drop in total births in Q1 2022 suggests.

This little graphic from a press release November 2021 shows the % change in number of births for the first half of 2021 broken down by birth order!

Destatis reports:

The increase was striking in the births of sibling children, i.e. second, third, and further births in the months of March and April 2021 compared to one year previously. This increase in births is mainly attributable to mothers of German nationality who already had at least one child. Their pregnancies began in June and July 2020 as the Corona situation had eased after the first lockdown. However this significant increase in births of siblings was temporary and did not continue after April 2021.

What can clearly be seen is % growth in second, third and further births disproportionately outpaced firstborns in the first half of the year. By Destatis’ own description, the Feb-Mar-Apr mini-boom in births came 9 months after the first lockdowns/restrictions were eased (so not quite lockdown babies). But I contend that these are most likely births by long-term couples (married or not), so I wouldn’t expect to see a fall in first births yet.

Notably, the annual proportion of births which are firstborns somehow remained very steady between 46-47% in the pre-pandemic years 2017-2020. This is the largest individual category with 46.3% (avg. 2018-2020). A relative change in first births is thus more significant to birth totals than a similar relative increase in the 2nd, or 3rd, 4th, or further categories. All other births, i.e. 2nd birth + more have a 53.7% avg. for 2018-2020) combined is slightly more significant in terms of birth totals than first births.

The next graphic from a press release April 2022 (Destatis’ English language section) gives another breakdown by birth order, this time for January-November 2021 and showing the year-on-year percentage change.

Destatis writes about the 3rd quarter:

In the further course of the year, the births of siblings developed very positively, while the total number of births, with the exception of August, only showed a slight increase.

While there is growth across all categories, growth in firstborns is clearly outstripped by couples extending their families.

The German Federal Statistics Agency (Destatis) has responded promptly to my data request but frustratingly only with data up to 2020 and not the exact data I requested - the data for the 2nd year of the pandemic 2021 is apparently still being processed. Strange - I don’t understand why they can’t give me data for 2021 because on their website they already offer the following very interesting graphic. It shows percentage increases of first, second, third, fourth and further children born to mothers for all of 2021 compared to the averages for 2018-2020.

Wow - why do the former West and East Germanies (Westdeutschland and Ostdeutschland) exhibit such contrasting birth trends in the second year of the pandemic? I will come to that in a moment but keep in mind that the former East German states only account for roughly 10% of annual births.

I want to focus first on the disproportionate increases of the different categories of birth order. Although firstborns (for all of Germany) did not fall in the second pandemic year, all other category births grew proportionately by more. So the lockdown mini baby boom of the 1st pandemic year was driven disproportionately by existing couples having additional children.

Destatis:

The increase in births in spring 2021 is due to the pregnancies that began in May and June 2020 when contact restrictions were relaxed. The increase in births in autumn 2021 is related to the pregnancies that began in the first quarter of 2021 when the second lockdown was still ongoing and the daycare centers and schools were mostly closed.

And now we can really see that Germany is still a nation formed from the former East and West Germanies plus the divided city of Berlin. Because the above chart shows there must be very different demographic trends at play. Destatis explains the number of adults around 30 years of age has been falling in the former East German states - due to reduced births in early nineties (and due to migration). So the birth rate has been falling due to larger demographic issues for some years, with 2021 down 5.1% representing a (much?) more prononced continuation of this trend.

However, this east-west breakdown of the data also means that some of my previous conclusions based on all-Germany data were perhaps overstated. Because if we only regard births from the former West German states in the 2nd pandemic year there is still almost 3% growth in firstborns. Hmmm… the Wedding Crasher effect on births does not manifest in 2021. Can it be that it only starts abruptly in January 2022?

Although I remain confident the effect of the size of the crash in weddings we saw in Q2 and Q3 of the first pandemic year will be large, I am starting to struggle to explain why it should suddenly appear in January 2022 (21 months after the crash in weddings and 9 months after the approximate start of the vaccination campaign in younger cohorts). My working idea was that starting a family doesn’t always go instantly according to plan and that most firstborns in fact arrive after 21-24 months after marriage (conception about a year after wedding). I really don’t like that I don’t currently have any data to back this up and it seems unlikely this interval would be consistent across different cultures/countries)

Remember: Left: Live Births, by month to Mar 2022; Right: Marriages, by year to 2021

Summary: I guess we’ll just have to wait until the breakdown of the births from 2022 is released (I asked again, extra nicely, if Destatis could give me this data). Remember, I was expecting it to show a decrease in the proportion of first births (47% in 2020) if it really is due to the Wedding Crasher effect of the pandemic response and not the vaccination campaign.

Note: I made some edits to my first post on German births to highligh just how many “missing marriages” there are from the pandemic. Here are the figures again:

• Total “missing marriages: ~111,000 (43k in 2020, 68k in 2021) based on pre-pandemic average (2015-2019) - 67% of all births are normally to married couples in Germany.

• Missing “first marriages”: ~66,500 (29.5k in 2020, 47k in 2021) and normally 60% of first births are within marriage.

By comparison, births for Jan-May 2022 are now down ~20,000 versus pre-pandemic average (2017-2020).

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UPDATE:

• Data updated - no significant changes

• 2021 data final - no longer provisional

• April 2022 data released - trend continues: at end of April ~25,000 “missing births”

• Breakdown of 2022 births - no significant changes to first births: abandon hypothesis?

  Update: Significant drop in German births