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The
ageing population will cause serious problems for pension systems
and social security financing
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VIENNA,
December 8 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Falling population rates
in eastern Europe ever since the fall of communism will aggravate the
problem of an ageing population in the enlarged European Union, experts
say.
Until
the end of the 1980s the eight ex-communist eastern European countries
due to join the E.U. in 2004 had higher birth rates than their western
neighbors.
They
now have large, mainly young workforces - but the brutal transition to a
market economy has brought with it falling birth rates, in a worrying
development for the region’s future, Agence France-Presse (AFP)
reported.
Poland,
which has the largest population in eastern Europe with 38.3 million
inhabitants, has already lost one million inhabitants in four years, and
is expected to have just 34 million population in 2050, according to the
Population Reference Office, a United States demographic institute.
By
that time, Estonia’s population will have dropped by 36 percent and
Hungary, which currently has 10.1 million population, will have lost a
fifth of its inhabitants.
“The
European Union will age even more quickly after the eastern countries
are included, because the demographic drop is bigger there. These
countries are seeing a process which will be visible here in 30
years,” German demographic analyst Rainer Muenz told AFP.
All
the countries in the region have birth rates of less than 1.5 children
per woman, including strongly Catholic Poland, which still had 2.5
children per woman in the mid-1980s.
At
the end of the 1990s Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Latvia had the
lowest birth rates in the world.
Slovakia
saw 55,400 births in 2000, compared to 80,400 in 1990 - a drop of more
than 30 percent. A study by the Center for Demographic Research in
Bratislava said the average age of the Slovakian population will climb
from 36 in 2001 to nearly 48 in 2050.
In
these countries, where unemployment is making new records, “bringing
children into the world carries with it a very high risk of falling into
poverty,” explained Zsuzsa Karpati, a member of the Hungarian
parliamentary commission on health.
“Under
communism homes were distributed according to the number of children,
women’s employment was guaranteed, and there were plenty of crèches
and nursery schools” - but social systems have collapsed during the
economic transition, said demographic expert Heinz Fassmann.
In
a report on the demographic consequences of E.U. enlargement he said
that the ageing population will cause serious problems for pension
systems and social security financing.
On
Tuesday, December 3, the United Nations urged developing countries to
invest in family planning to cut fertility rates and open a
“demographic window” for economic growth.
“There
is solid evidence, based on two generations of experience and research,
that there is a ‘population effect’ on economic growth,” the U.N.
Population Fund (UNFPA) said in a new report.
UNFPA
provides almost six billion dollars a year to reproductive health
programs, which include care for pregnant women and newborn babies and
prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and HIV/AIDS as well as
family planning.
The
report, “People, Poverty and Possibilities”, argued that addressing
population concerns was crucial to meeting the U.N.’s Millennium
Summit goals, which include halving global poverty and arresting the
spread of HIV/AIDS by 2015.
It
encouraged governments in poor countries to follow the example of the
Asian “tiger” nations, which invested in health and education early
in the development process.
“Given
a real choice, poor people in developing countries have smaller families
than their parents did,” the report said.
Responding
to a question on whether population control is allowed by Islam, Sheikh Ahmad Kutty,
a senior lecturer and an Islamic scholar at the Islamic Institute of
Toronto, Ontario, Canada said:
“As
far as population control in a collective level imposed by the
government is concerned, there is no room for its permissibility in
Islam. The argument used by the so-called expert cannot stand rational
scrutiny.
“Everyone
with common sense knows that the problem of poverty in the world is not
simply attributed to lack of resources or over population, rather it is
because of few capitalists monopolizing those recourses.
“Allah
has provided enough resources to sustain the full population. However,
human beings commit injustice when the stronger of them devour the weak.
“Allah
has also granted us scientific knowledge to invent creative ways of
allocating the resources in order to face the challenges of poverty.
“Coming
to the issue of the individual resorting to family planning because of
some individual considerations such as sufferings between births, health
considerations or education and proper nurturing of children, it has
been considered permissible to do so according to the fatwas of
contemporary recognized scholars.”
