For the first time in five years, the birth rate in Bavaria fell again in 2022. As the State Office for Statistics announced on Wednesday in Fürth, it was 1.49 per woman. It was thus 0.12 below the figure for the previous year, when there was a high birth rate. It will only become clear in the next few years whether this is a fluctuation or a trend reversal towards a persistently lower level of births.
The birth rate or total birth rate for a year indicates how many babies on average a woman would have in the course of her life if the conditions for that year remained unchanged. The birth behavior of all women between the ages of 15 and 49 is decisive for this.
The value for 2022 is therefore only one hundredth higher than that for 2015. From 2001 to 2012, the birth rate in Bavaria was consistently below a value of 1.4. One reason for the development in 2022 could be that more families would have implemented their desire to have children in the first year after the start of the corona pandemic, i.e. 2021. That is why fewer children could have been born in the following year, the statisticians suspect. In 2021, the highest birth rate in Bavaria for 49 years was determined, namely 1.61 children per woman.