IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/imf/imfwpa/2025-055.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Lost Generations? Fertility and Economic Growth in Europe

Author

Listed:
  • Mr. Serhan Cevik

Abstract

The total fertility rate—the average number of births per woman—in Europe is already at 1.46, which is significantly below the replacement rate of 2.1, where fertility compensates for mortality and thereby the population replaces itself from one generation to the next. Falling fertility rates will have far-reaching social and economic consequences, and therefore it is a critical empirical exercise to estimate the impact of below-replacement fertility on income growth and test quantitatively for the existence of mitigating factors that could inform appropriate policy responses. In this paper, I address the endogeneity bias caused by reverse causality by implementing an instrumental variable approach and use exogenous variation in the comparative abortion index as an instrument for the total fertility rate. These results show that fertility has a significant positive effect on real GDP per capita growth in a sample of 42 European countries over the period 1960–2022. This means that the downward fertility transition across Europe, accompanied by fast-aging population, is a significant drag on income per capita growth.

Suggested Citation

  • Mr. Serhan Cevik, 2025. "Lost Generations? Fertility and Economic Growth in Europe," IMF Working Papers 2025/055, International Monetary Fund.
    • Handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2025/055
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=565380
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2025/055. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Akshay Modi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imfffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.