Births in Greece - The detailed view of an Analyst

Births

Introduction

This is an independent study conducted by Nikolaos Kouvoutsakis. The main subject of this research is to monitor and explore the number of births in Greece from 2001 to 2016. We will try to identify key Factors that are influencing the phenomenon and further predict the future outcome. All data used is publicly available and was downloaded from the official website of the Hellenic Statistical Authority. The following results are just a summary of a 32-paged detailed study which was written entirely in R Statistical Programming Language.

Executive summary and Births Prediction

There is a statistical significant difference in the no of Births in Greece when we compare the periods before (2001-2010) and during (2011-2016) the Economic Crisis. The number of Births is decreasing and this trend is generally noticed across all country’s regions. We also notice different trends when comparing these two periods, moving from an upward trend to a downward trend.

Additional:

1. 97% of total annual births are coming from women of age 20-44
2. Any difference and fluctuation in the number of births between the periods before and during the economic crisis is driven entirely from women of age 20-44.

Births regression model

We can easily built a good regression model to predict and best describe births by only using two factors:

1. ASFR - Age-Specific Fertility Rate which is the number of live births per 1000 women in a specific age group for a specified geographic area and for a specific point in time, usually a calendar year.
2. The corresponding women population

Population of women 20-44 is influenced by the number of deaths , immigration and the effect of aging.

• We notice that the factor of aging is causing and will cause in the upcoming years, a huge effect on Women(20-44) population. The available population is decreasing rapidly, because the number of persons entering the 20-44 age group are significant less that the number of persons exiting the group. If we split women age group 20-44 into smaller age group segments ,this effect is noticed across all sub groups, having as an only exception women age group 40-44 which is managing to maintain it’s numbers steady.

• We notice that %Deaths to population figures for women 20-44 are almost steady through the years, having very small variation. We can assume that we will not have any significant changes in the figures and it is quite safe to use the averages as an estimation for the upcoming years.

• We notice that the immigration balance (Immigrants out minus Immigrants in) for each women age group , after reaching their highest values for the years 2012 to 2014, trend to reach the zero value in the next years. This is driven by the slow decrease in the number of persons leaving the country and mostly by the increase in the number of persons entering the country. It is important to note that the increase in the number of immigrants entering the country is almost entirely driven by the increased number of immigrants coming from more and least developed countries. We assume that the expected future growth of the Greek economy combined with the expected decrease in the Unemployment rate will slow down the number of persons leaving the country. It is also expected that the number of immigrants entering the country will remain at high rates. Based on above two combined facts we assume that the immigration balance will remain at 2016 figures for the upcoming years with a slightly downward trend.

Below we are presenting the final women 20-44 population forecast up until 2020.

ASFR Women 20-44.

Almost all births in Greece are coming from married couples. That’s the reason we focused our research on households composed by a couple with no child or a couple with one child up to 16 years old.

We were able to built a good regression model to predict and best describe ASFR of Women 20-44 by only using two factors:

• LONE: Households composed by a couple with no child and where the age of household head is 24 to 44 as a percentage of total households where the age of household head is 24 to 44.
• LONEINC: Average Monthly income of households composed by a couple with no child.

Births Forecast

We predict that the number of births will remain in low levels in the forthcoming years in Greece. This result will be driven by the continuous decrease in the women population of ages 20 to 44, which are the major birth contributors. This fact can be balanced or slightly reversed only if ASFR (Women 20-44) rates show a remarkable improvement, which is not the most common scenario. We have ran three different cases on the ASFR rates , presenting below the final births outcome for the forthcoming years.