people in a public square with soap bubbles in the air, child running around.

Although demographic changes tend to be slow and may not be noticeable in the short term, the COVID-19 pandemic had a substantial impact on the EU’s demography. For example, did you know that life expectancy at birth in the EU fell from 81.3 years in 2019 to 80.4 years in 2020 and 80.1 years in 2021? Or that the total fertility rate (the average number of live births per woman) was 1.53 in 2019, dropped to 1.50 in 2020 and returned to 1.53 in 2021? Or that in 2020 and 2021, affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the crude marriage rate recorded its lowest values since 1964 (the first available year) at 3.2 and 3.9, respectively?

For more interesting data on demography, visit Eurostat’s 2023 edition of the interactive publication Demography of Europe, containing dynamic visualisations and short texts. 

 

The publication is divided into four sections: population structure, population change, population diversity and marital status.