Germany Saw Record Births, But Deaths Outpace The Baby Boom

There’s a poetic notion that for every heart-wrenching death, for every family feeling that pain, a new baby is welcomed to our pale blue planet. In truth, the circle of life has become a bit misshapen in the past 50 years, with the world experiencing an unprecedented boom in population from about 2.7 billion to about 7.3 billion.

For its part, Germany recently has seen a baby boom, but an unfortunate “death boom” of sorts has more than canceled out those births, the Local reported. Some 738,000 babies were born last year in Germany, the highest figure in the past 15 years. The data from the German Federal Statistics Office (Destatis) represented a 3.2 percent uptick over the year prior, or some 23,000 more births.

Deaths far outweighed the record number of births, however. Some 925,000 people died in Germany in 2015. That’s reportedly the most deaths in 30 years.

Germany’s population is about 82 million. It has one of the lowest birth rates in the Western world and its population has been in decline due to a continued birth deficit, meaning more people are dying than are being born. That’s been the case since 1972. Last year, of the country’s 16 states, only the city-states of Hamburg and Berlin had more births than deaths.

The country’s population actually increased last year, however, due to the migration of refugees to Germany, the Guardian reported. Some 1 million asylum-seekers entered the country in the last year alone. Long-term estimates, however, still project Germany’s population to fall to 73.1 million by 2060. The world population, on the other hand, is expected to rise to 9.4 billion by 2050.

Hope for new births this year in Germany might rest with a record number of newlyweds. The country saw 400,000 marriages in 2015, a 3.6 percent increase over the year prior and the highest such number in 15 years, according to Destatis data.