Jun 5, 2007, 11:11 GMT
Wiesbaden, Germany - Germany's birthrate, one of the lowest in Europe, declined further in 2006, while the population also shrunk, according to official statistics released on Tuesday.
A total of 673,000 babies were born in Europe's biggest economy last year, some 1.9 per cent or 13,000 fewer than in 2005, the Federal Statistics Office said.
With 822,000 deaths recorded in 2006, the number of new births was below the replacement level. As a result, the population declined by 0.1 per cent to 82.31 million, the statistics office said.
Deaths have outstripped new births in Germany every year since 1991, but the population had risen because of immigration. This trend ended in 2003 and the population has gone down every year since.
Efforts to shore up the birthrate have met with little success so far.
The government has introduced tax breaks to help couples that want children and has agreed to a vast expansion of nursery school places that would allow women to have children and continue working.
The statistics office said the birthrate was lowest in the federal states that were part of East Germany before unification in 1990.
A recent study showed that these states were being drained of young women, many of whom have gone to western Germany, or to foreign countries.
Since the collapse of communism, 1.5 million people, about 10 per cent of the population of the former East Germany, have headed west in the hope of better work opportunities.
A large proportion involved well-educated women aged between 18 and 29, leaving a 25-per-cent surplus of men in some regions, the report by the Institute for Population and Development said.
The study said the male-female imbalance in the east is already leading to a fall in the birthrate in that part of Germany.
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