A woman breastfeeding in Helsinki in September 2019. Statistics Finland has reported that this year is on track to become already the seventh consecutive year when fewer than 50,000 children are born in Finland. Despite the slumping birth rate, the Finnish population could grow to six million by the early 2030s and to 6.5 million by the early 2070s if net immigration remains at its current level. (Irene Stachon – Lehtikuva)
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MARKUS RAPO, a senior statistician at Statistics Finland, has published a blog post in a bid to clear misconceptions about a newly published, much-discussed population forecast.
Statistics Finland in October forecast that the Finnish population will grow to six million by the early 2030s and by another half-a-million by the 2070s, kindling widespread debate particularly about the projected level of immigration underlying the forecast.
The forecast is considerably more optimistic than its two previous forecasts. In 2021, the bureau forecast that population growth would come to a halt in 2033.
Annual net immigration is currently expected to settle at last year’s level of around 40,000, according to Statistics Finland. The forecast, it said, reflects the uncertainties associated with immigration, with the self-sufficiency projection – a projection that leaves out immigration – indicating that the population would shrink by almost 475,000 in the next two decades.
While net immigration is expected to sustain population growth in the coming decades, it does not prevent but simply postpones the creeping up of the dependency ratio, it also reminded.
The working-age population, or the number of 15–64-year-old people, is forecast to peak in the early 2050s at roughly 3.85 million, representing an increase of almost 400,000 from 2023. Working-age people currently account for 62 per cent of the population, a proportion that will be upheld by immigration until the 2050s.
In 2070, though, working-age people will only account for 58 per cent of the population, while the share of over 65-year-olds will have expanded from the current 23 per cent to 31 per cent.
The Finnish population has grown by roughly 25,000 people this year as a result of roughly 37,000 people moving into the country from overseas. Without immigration, the population would have decreased by almost 10,000 as deaths continue to outnumber births.
This year is set to mark already the seventh consecutive year when fewer than 50,000 children are born in Finland.
Jani Mäkelä, the chairperson of the Finns Party Parliamentary Group, in October expressed his doubts about the accuracy of the forecast, viewing that the high level of immigration must be attributable to refugees from Ukraine.
“It doesn’t sound like a positive development. I don’t think the forecast will become reality,” he remarked to Helsingin Sanomat on 24 October.
Mäkelä said the Finns Party has no numerical targets for net immigration and is unconvinced that large-scale immigration could fix the problems in Finland. “Statistics tell that unemployment and crime are relatively speaking more common among immigrants than the native-born population. We think that if you come into the country, you have to have a genuine and proper reason.”
Net immigration rose last year to almost 40,000 even without refugees from Ukraine, Statistics Finland’s Rapo reminded on Monday. It is therefore justified to assume net migration gains could remain at that level also in the coming years.
Finland had registered a net migration gain of about 23,000 in 2021 and 34,000 in 2022.
Rapo added that the forecast depicts demographic development in the event that the birth rate remains at its current historically low level, mortality continues to decrease at the observed rate and international migration flows remain at their current level.
“Statistics Finland’s population forecast is designed to offer an opportunity to react. If the projected demographic development is undesirable, decision-makers should try to prevent it,” he explained in his blog post.
Rapo also conceded that it is “clear as day” that demographic development will not continue unchanged for decades.
The forecast, he said, utilises the cohort-component method to project how the population would develop if current trends were to persist. Such forecasts have proven relatively accurate: the 2007 forecast, for example, accurately projected the development of the over 50-year-old population but not that of the under 50-year-old population, namely by greatly overestimating the under 10-year-old population.
The forecast indicated that there would be more than 60,000 children in each age cohort under the age of 10, significantly more than the actual numbers. Age cohorts in the 10–50-year range have contrastively been a few thousand larger than forecast in 2007.
“This is because the birth rate has declined and immigration has increased from the prevalent level in 2007,” explained Rapo.
Aleksi Teivainen – HT
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Source: www.helsinkitimes.fi
