外刊听读| 经济学人 南欧生育率持续走低

Southern demography

南欧人口

Baby gap

婴儿差距

Why southern Europe has fewer babies than the north

为什么南欧的婴儿比北欧少

 

THE MUSEO DEGLI INNOCENTI in Florence has an unusual name and hosts an unusual display: a collection of small broken objects, mostly medallions. They were split in two when a baby was delivered to Florence’s hospital for foundlings. Half the object, known as a segnale di riconoscimento, was kept at the hospital—in reality, a children’s home—while the other went to the mother. Should she wish to reclaim the child, she would have proof it was hers. Many of the children were born out of wedlock. But others were from families without the means to feed another mouth.

 

佛罗伦萨的孤儿院博物馆(Museo degli Innocenti)有一个不寻常的名字，并举办了一场不寻常的展览:一系列的小碎物，大多是奖章。当一个婴儿被送到佛罗伦萨的弃儿医院时，这些奖章被一分为二。其中的一半被称为segnale di riconoscimento（信物），保存在医院——实际上是一所孤儿院——而另一半则交给了母亲。如果她想要回孩子，她会有证据证明孩子是自己的。许多孩子是私生子，但也有来自没有能力养活孩子的家庭。

The segnali are reminders of a time when Italy had an excess of births. Today, in common with many other European countries, it has hardly any. Its fertility rate (the average number of babies each Italian woman can expect to have) has dropped from 2.66 in 1964 to 1.24 in 2020. In one region, Sardinia, it is below 1. This makes Italy part of a band of ultra-low fertility across southern Europe, from Portugal and Spain (1.40 and 1.19) in the west to Greece and Cyprus (1.39 and 1.36) in the east. As 2.1 children per woman are needed to keep numbers stable, these countries must have more babies, admit more immigrants or see their populations dwindle.

 

segnali让人们想起了意大利人口过剩的时代。如今，和许多其他欧洲国家一样，它几乎没有新生儿。意大利生育率(每个意大利妇女预期生育的婴儿的平均数量)已经从1964年的2.66下降到2020年的1.24。在撒丁岛，这一数据低于1。这使得意大利成为南欧超低生育率国家的一员，从西部的葡萄牙和西班牙(1.40和1.19)到东部的希腊和塞浦路斯(1.39和1.36)。由于每个妇女需要生育2.1个孩子来保持人口稳定，这些国家必须有更多的婴儿，接纳更多的移民，不然人口就会逐渐减少。

 

Only the first of these options appeals to Europe’s rightwing populists. So they are keen to find ways to persuade native-born women to have bigger families. Few have put such emphasis on the birth rate as the Brothers of Italy, the hard-right party whose leader, Giorgia Meloni, is the country’s new prime minister. The encouragement to Italians to multiply flows in part from the party’s opposition to unauthorised immigration. “Support for the birth rate and the family” was top of a list of 15 policy objectives in its electoral manifesto.

 

只有第一个选项对欧洲右翼民粹主义者有吸引力。因此，他们热衷于寻找方法来说服本地女性拥有更大的家庭。很少有像意大利兄弟党那样重视生育率，意大利兄弟党是一个极右翼政党，其领导人焦尔吉娅·梅洛尼是该国的新总理。鼓励意大利人增加移民的部分原因是该党反对非法移民。“支持生育率和家庭”是其竞选宣言中15项政策目标的第一项。

 

Constrained by Italy’s huge gross public debt, of around 147% of GDP, Ms Meloni’s government has so far had limited scope for realising its aims. The budget for next year nevertheless includes some changes that the finance minister, Giancarlo Giorgetti, has suggested are just the beginning. They include an increase in child benefits for the first child and for families with more than three children; a modest extension of maternity leave; reductions in the VAT on baby-care products; and changes in the pensionable age so that the more children a woman has, the earlier she will be able to retire.

 

受意大利高达GDP 147%的巨额公共债务约束，梅洛尼女士的政府迄今为止实现其竞选目标的能力有限。尽管如此，明年的政府预算也包括了一些变化，财政部长贾恩卡洛·焦尔杰蒂认为这仅仅是个开始。改变包括增加第一个孩子和有三个以上孩子的家庭的儿童福利；适度延长产假；降低婴儿护理产品的增值税；改变退休年龄，已达到妇女生育的孩子越多，就能越早退休的目标。

 

The new facts of life

新的生活状况

In the worldview of the new right, feminism has given rise to generations of women who would rather work and play than raise children. But this narrative ignores two crucial facts. The first is that the most staunchly feminist countries, those in northern Europe, now have some of the continent’s highest birth rates. And the second is that women are often not opposed to having children; they are having fewer than they say they want, mostly for economic reasons.

 

在新右派的世界观中，女权主义造就了一代又一代宁愿工作和玩耍也不愿抚养孩子的女性。但这种说法忽略了两个关键事实。首先，最坚定的女权主义国家，即北欧国家，如今拥有欧洲大陆最高的生育率。第二，女性通常不反对生孩子；她们实际得到的比她们宣称想要得到的要少，主要是因为经济层面的原因。

Globally, a fairly robust law has long linked national wealth and birth rates: as countries become richer, birth rates fall. But a group of researchers at the Centre for Economic Policy Research argue that among the richest nations the opposite now applies. In the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries, there is now a positive correlation between GDP per head and fertility, they find (see chart). The most likely explanation for this is complex. As women enter the workforce, they increase economic output with their labour and talent. They may also then vote for governments that spend money making it easier to be both a parent and an employee. Spending on family support also correlates positively with fertility. Generous paid maternity leave is one such policy; and the evidence that supports spending on child care is even stronger. If women cannot easily work in the early years of a child’s life, the work-family trade-off remains ironclad.

 

在全球范围内，一项相当健全的法律长期以来一直将国家财富和生育率联系在一起：随着国家变得更加富裕，生育率下降。但伦敦经济政策研究中心的一组研究人员认为，在最富裕的国家中，如今的情况正好相反。他们发现，在主要由富裕国家组成的经合组织中，人均GDP和生育率之间存在正相关关系(见图表)。对此，最有可能的解释是复杂的。随着妇女进入劳动力市场，她们凭借自己的劳动和才能增加了经济产出。然后，她们也可能投票支持花钱让工作和生活更容易兼顾的政府。家庭支持支出也与生育率正相关。充足的带薪产假就是这样一项政策；支持儿童保健的政府支出证据甚至更加有力。如果女性在孩子生命的最初几年难以轻松地工作，那么工作与家庭的权衡仍然是不容置疑的。

 

In Malta—once called “more Catholic than the pope” but now boasting Europe’s lowest fertility rate, at 1.13—women are still more than 30 times more likely than men to drop out of work to look after their families. The tension between money, career and family can be acute. Marie Briguglio, a former senior civil servant, chose to postpone having her only child until she was 38. She says it was about the opportunity cost: had she had children earlier her rise through the administration would have been jeopardised.

 

在马耳他——曾经被称为“比教皇还天主教”的国家，如今自豪地拥有1.13，全欧洲最低的生育率——女性仍然比男性多约30倍的可能性放弃工作来照顾家庭。金钱、事业和家庭之间的矛盾可能会很尖锐。前高级公务员玛丽·布里格利奥(Marie Briguglio)选择将唯一的孩子的出生推迟到38岁。她说这与机会成本有关:如果她早点生孩子，自己在政府中的地位就会受到损害。

 

“I played the lottery every week after my second son was born,” says Inés, a small-business owner in Madrid. Having failed to score the winning ticket, she decided not to have the third child she would have liked. The gap in Spain between the number of children born (1.19 per woman) and the number desired (around two) is one of Europe’s highest. Alicia Adserà, an economist at Princeton, looks for explanations wider than those (like child care, maternity leave, child tax breaks or men’s housework) directly related to family. She says that broader conditions—in particular the jobs market—play a critical role too.

 

“在我第二个儿子出生后，我每周都去买彩票，”马德里的小企业主伊内斯说。由于未能获得中奖彩票，她决定不要自己期望中的第三个孩子。西班牙的生育率(每名妇女1.19)和理想生育率(大约2)之间的差距是欧洲最高的之一。普林斯顿大学的经济学家艾丽西娅·阿德斯拉(Alicia Adserà)寻求除了家庭之外的 (如儿童保育、产假、儿童税收减免或男性家务)更广泛的解释。她说，更广泛的条件——尤其是就业市场——也起着关键作用。

 

Spanish women surged into education and work after the “national Catholic” dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who died in 1975. The country built a wave of child-care centres, and today subsidises them with a voucher each month. Spanish maternity leave is relatively miserly (16 weeks) by European standards; but men get the same amount as women. Grandparents provide a great deal of help with children, and for richer families, immigration (especially from Latin America) provides a source of affordable nannies.

 

在弗朗西斯科·佛朗哥(1975年去世)的“国家天主教”独裁统治后，西班牙女性涌入教育和工作领域。该国建立了一批儿童保育中心，如今每个月都用代金券补贴它们。以欧洲标准衡量，西班牙产假相对较少(16周)；但男人和女人得到产假的一样多。祖父母为孩子提供了大量的帮助，对于较富裕的家庭来说，移民(尤其是来自拉丁美洲的移民)提供了负担得起的保姆来源。

But despite all that, Spain lags begin in one crucial area: opportunities for the young. The youth unemployment rate is among the highest in the rich world, at around 35%. A study of the years 2008-16 found Spanish youngsters worked for almost eight years stringing together temporary contracts before landing a permanent one. This delays marriage as well as childbirth; almost half of 25- to 34-year-olds now live with their parents. When Spaniards do finally couple up they have experienced the freedoms of childless adulthood for a decade. Around a fifth of women go on to have no children at all, a big driver of the overall drop in fertility. For those who take the plunge, the average age of women at first birth, at 31, is one of the highest in Europe, along with Italy and Malta. Many stop there; one-child families are so common that El Mundo, a conservative newspaper, envisioned a future country “without brothers and sisters”.

 

尽管如此，西班牙在一个关键领域开始落后:年轻人的机会。西班牙年轻人的失业率是富裕国家中最高的，约为35%。一项2008年至2016年的研究发现，西班牙年轻人工作近8年后才能在获得一份永久合同。在这之前，他们一直在签订临时合同。这推迟了结婚和生育；几乎一半的25至34岁的年轻人现在和父母住在一起。当西班牙人最终结婚时，他们已经经历了十年无子女的自由生活。大约五分之一的女性根本没有孩子，这是生育率总体下降的一个重要原因。对于那些敢于冒险的人来说，女性第一次生育的平均年龄为31岁，是欧洲最高的国家之一，其中还包括意大利和马耳他。许多人止步于生一个孩子；独生子女家庭是如此普遍，以至于保守派报纸《西班牙世界报》设想了一个“没有兄弟姐妹”的未来国家。

 

The late start to procreation may be a big factor in low overall fertility. At any rate, a paper by Poh Lin Tan of the University of Singapore notes that a raft of economic incentives offered in Singapore to parents has failed to stop the continuing drop in fertility there, to 1.16 in 2018. She says that reducing the age of childbearing is the “lowest-hanging fruit” of policymaking.

 

晚育可能是总体生育率低的一个重要因素。无论如何，新加坡国立大学的Poh Lin Tan的一篇论文指出，新加坡政府向父母提供大量的经济激励措施也未能阻止该国生育率的持续下降。到2018年生育率降至1.16。她说降低法定生育年龄是政策制定中“最容易摘到的果实”。

 

But that requires economic opportunities, says Dr Adserà. This can take the form of a large number of stable jobs, for example in the public sector, as in the Nordic countries, she says. (Women are generally over-represented in the public sector.) Or it can take the form of dynamic job markets, where a job lost is reasonably likely to be replaced, perhaps by a better one—as in America, Britain or Australia, which boast higher fertility than southern Europe.

 

但是这需要经济层面的机会，阿德斯拉博士说。她表示，就像在北欧国家一样，具体可以表现为大量稳定的工作，比如在政府公共部门。(妇女在政府公共部门的人数通常过多。)或者可以采取动态就业市场的形式，失去的工作很可能会被更好的工作所替代——就像美国、英国或澳大利亚所做的那样，这些国家自诩拥有比南欧更高的生育率。

 

Fix, don’ t bribe

解决问题，不要补贴

But what seems clear is that simple baby bribes—whether they come as one-time bonuses, monthly giveaways or tax credits— are not enough. More generally, says Frank Furedi of MCC, a Hungarian-government-funded think-tank, “pro-natalist policies simply don’t work.” The evidence from Poland seems similar; the government there has run a generous monthly child benefit since 2016, but it has not seen an uptick in babies born. The best countries can do is make combining work and family less difficult. As Georgia Meloni’s government considers new measures for Italy, the political temptation will be to announce “pro-family” policies. But what young couples really want is job opportunities, support and choice. If all are available, more of them may use that choice to have more babies.

 

但似乎很清楚的是，简单的生育补贴——无论是一次性奖金、每月的赠品还是税收抵免——都是不够的。匈牙利政府资助的智库MCC的Frank Furedi说，更普遍的情况是，“支持生育的政策根本不起作用。”波兰的现状似乎应证了这一说法；自2016年以来，那里的政府每月都有慷慨的儿童福利，但新生儿数量并没有增加。各国政府所能做的最好的事情就是让工作和家庭的平衡变得不那么困难。随着焦尔吉娅·梅洛尼政府考虑对意大利采取新措施，宣布“支持家庭”的政策对她来说是一种政治诱惑。但年轻夫妇真正想要的是工作机会、支持和选择权。如果这一切都能做到，可能会有更多的人会选择生更多的孩子。