Record low birthrate in Norway this year

What is happening?

As you might know if you have followed my Substack, something weird has been happening with the birthrates worldwide recently.

Mysteriously, all over the world the birthrates have collapsed at the same time and the experts seem to have no idea what is going on.

For example, in Stockholm it was down some 14%, in Germany it was down 12% and in Taiwan it was down a whopping 27%. Now something is going on that seems to have affected the birthrate in many countries across the world simultaneously.

"It is a drastic and remarkable reduction beyond the usual. We have never seen anything like this before, that the bottom just falls out in just one quarter" said Gunnar Andersson, professor in demographics at Stockholm University to Dagens Nyheter.

It would be on thing if it only happened in one country. But when it happens in many countries simultaneously, something weird is going on.

If you want to read about it in detail, I highly recommend you read my previous article on the subject here:

Something weird is happening with the birth rates.

Now I have come across some information about the birthrates in Norway so we can compare how they are doing with the rest of the world.

Norway now has the lowest birthrate on record.

So Norway too has since a decrease in the number of births this year, however it doesn’t seem to be as bad as it has been in many other countries, so let’s take a closer look.

Interestingly, the birthrate actually rose for the first time in 12 years in 2021 during the pandemic. However during the first quarter of 2022, the birthrate has fallen to new record lows.

Screenshot from SSB on the Norwegian birthrates.

In the first quarter of 2022 there was born 12 869 babies, compared with 13 726 in 2021. In other words, this is a decrease by 6.2%. But we need to keep in mind here that 2021 saw an increase in the number of births compared with the years before.

So if we look at 2019 which was before we got any pandemic restrictions, there was 13 407 babies born. Even compared with 2019 we then see a 4% decrease in births compared with this year.

Now it could be that more people decided to have babies in 2021 and we are seeing a compensatory drop this year.

According to an expert at the Norwegian health authorities this decrease could be explained because women take more education nowadays and that secularization and increased housing prices contribute to lower birthrates.

In any case the birthrate is down in Norway, but not nearly as much as in other countries where we have seen 2 to 3 times bigger drops. The interesting thing is that the birthrate appears to have dropped more among younger women as you can see on this chart here.

Screenshot from SSB.

This correlates with what I found in the Britain where some younger women did not appear to have as many babies as they normally would, again read more about that in my previous article here:

Something weird is happening with the birth rates.

Another thing I saw when looking into the birthrate statistics is that there appears to have been an increase in the death rate in Norway this year.

11 900 people died in the first quarter of 2022, compared with only 10 100 in 2021. That’s a whopping 18% increase.

Screenshot from SSB on the death rate in Norway.

Now it should be said that death rate in Norway was actually lower than normal during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, only to increase dramatically in 2022.

”The death rate was artificially low in 2020 and into 2021 due to restrictions against the corona pandemic. These helped protect the most vulnerable among us and did so that more people got to live longer than during more normal circumstances. Now most of the restrictions are gone, and for the third quarter in a row the death rate was higher than during the same period a year before” says Espen Andersen at SSB, the Norwegian statistics bureau.

So births are down. The death rate is dramatically up.

What is going on here?

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