Total fertility rate

South Korea's birth rate fell to a record low last year, the government said Wednesday, despite having poured billions of dollars into efforts to encourage women to have more children and maintain population stability.

The country has one of the world's longest life expectancies and lowest birth rates, a combination that presents a looming demographic challenge.

Immigration is a topic that is sure to animate any political discussion and campaign. Unmanaged it risks elevating the extreme right to positions of power. And yet the flip side of all this is an enormous opportunity to boost Western liberal democracy and infuse it with the dynamism it now lacks.

Bulgaria has been identified as the 11th fastest shrinking nation globally and the 25th highest aging nation, according to a recent CIA report cited by Nova TV. The United Nations has corroborated these findings, highlighting the overall fertility rate as a key indicator. Europe's rate stands at 1.5, falling short of the 2.1-point threshold necessary to maintain population stability.

Slovenia's fertility rate declined to 1.55 last year from 1.64 the year before as under 18,000 children were born, 7% less than in 2021, the latest Statistics Office data show.

The 17,627 births, or 8.4 per 1,000 population, is the fifth lowest number in the 101 years since population statistics have been available.

The birth rate in Turkey decreased for the seventh year in a row, data for 2022 show, reaching 1.62 live births per woman, Anadolu Agency reported, citing a statement from the Turkish Statistical Institute - Turksat (Europe announced a value of 1.53 for 2021).

According to the data of the Address Based Population Registration System (ABPRS), the average household size in Türkiye is decreasing, falling from four people in 2008 to 3.17 people in 2022, the Turkish Statistics Institute (TÜİK) has announced.

Anxieties about "too few" people are particularly strong in Eastern Europe, where low fertility rates are compounded by high levels of emigration. As a result, country's populations have been shrinking, in some cases by more than 25 per cent since the early 1990s.

Women in Europe are giving birth to their first child later than before: according to the European statistics agency Eurostat, the average age of first-time mothers in the European Union was 29.7 years in 2021, reported the "Frankfurter Rundschau". Statistics place Bulgarian women among the youngest mothers - the average age when they have their first child is 26.

Globally, Muslims have the highest fertility rate of any religious group

An expert projects that the share of the elderly population in Turkey's total population will reach the same level in Europe in 2060 given the current trajectory of the fertility rate in the country.

The fertility rate represents the ratio between the average number of live births in a year and the number that a woman would have during her childbearing years - the 15-49 age group.