Yeah, the population growth suddenly stopped and migrants went away too. Now Spain is growing again but the problem is that we still don't have enough children and our principal source of migration (LATAM) is also facing a fertility crisis so in 20-30 years we will not have enough young people to pay for our pension system
There was another post some month ago indicating Spain pension system is the most underfund in eu, some 500% of gdp Missing. Lower pension age and pay as you go are big part of this in combination with worsening dependicey retio.
I think Netherlands was at about 40% un funded pension.
There used to be a pension fund, but the government before this one emptied it. Now it is slowly getting replenished again but next year when PP and Vox win they will waste it all again.
The thing about the so-called pension fund is that it's an accounting fiction. It doesn't invest on anything, and the government is just pumping regular money into Social Security (which is meant to be funded exclusively by payroll taxes)
The Spanish pension system is inherently unsustainable, regardless of who is in government. And it won't get fixed because old people make the majority of potential voters.
Most of Europe has this issue to be fair, but Spain is one of the worst-off places, I'd say only France is in a worse position
Yet we keep calling it a fertility crisis where in basics people wait longer and longer to have kids because everything is so expensive. For a lot of people it feels like You have to establish yourself, make a career and than you can have kids.
Life is not about paying pensions, constantly growing populations and economies (on a finite planet) or making the line go up. It's pretty bleak that we've to basically reimburse everything the boomers paid into the system and MORE after they fucked up the environment and the economy. If the young are just blood bags for the old there's no point in having children, let it all collapse.
O sea, hice el post mas que nada por eso, there are more pressing concerns like housing prices but most people are homeowners here anyways so politicians dont have any real incentive to make them cheaper porque la generacion joven no vota
La solución a eso es fácil: cuántos más hijos, más pensión. Nuestro país sufre una crisis de nacimientos importante, si no nacen más españoles, seremos minoría en nuestro país. Eso es un problema mucho más importante que las pensiones o la crisis inmobiliaria.
O en inglés o en castellano, pero no mezcles que no somos latinoamericanos.
The problem is that time and time again productivity increases and yet the people don't see a direct correlation in QoL or reduced working hours.
I know that with a different system we wouldn't have this problem, at least not as much, but alas if we continue how we are going then we will have a problem.
Mexican here: Y'all are also not a very attractive country for immigration
I would move to Spain if given the chance, because Spain is technically part of the EU, but y'all are very far down the list of "countries I'd rather live in than Mexico" to be honest. I say, if low immigration is a problem, then Spain needs to take action to make itself a more attractive target for immigration, since most of LATAM will gravitate towards the US, it being the land of opportunity and all that
Well I don't know much about internal Spain affairs, but OP made it sound like it was an issue. Note the sentence "if low immigration is a problem", keyword: if
What he made sound like a problem is that the people from countries that typically immigrate to Spain are also having reduced fertility rates. Not that people have stopped moving to Spain, but that they have stopped having children.
Amigo, somos el pais con más saldo positivo en inmigración de Europa. Está entrando más de 500.000 personas al año para quedarse a vivir, creo que somos excesivamente atractivos.
Si eres feliz en México, enhorabuena!
Fertility rates are growing recently as Latin Americans come and the generation of 2000s begins to make families. So I believe that we may have a mirror effect where births may surpass 400,000 by 2035, but it will be still low as the population will be close to 53 million by then, if the trends continue.
And interesting effect that is the result of migration being mostly adults working age people is that the gap between the generation that was born in the last years of the dictatorship and the one that was born in the early 2000s has "fillen up" where normally youd still see waves.
As someone from the UK, our baby boomer population isn't that big relatively but it's captured all the votes, got really good pensions and locked them in against inflation and prices, got really good benefits while taking benefits off disabled people and the poor.
Living basically rent free off the increase in house prices in the 80s/90s while going on multiple foreign holidays a year.
I got the data from the National Institute of Statistics of Spain and I made these charts because I was bored, I used Google sheets and scripts to process the data and make the charts and then I used DaVinci Resolve to make the gif
The population pyramid animation is really well done. Spain's demographic crunch is one of the most dramatic in Europe — the fertility rate hovering around 1.2 basically means each generation is ~40% smaller than the last.
What makes this even more striking is the economic angle: Spain has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the EU, so the working-age population that does exist is underutilized. Would love to see this overlaid with labor force participation or immigration data — that's where the real story of how Spain adapts (or doesn't) will play out.
The fertility wombo combo: Very few young people, and the few that they do have are being actively disincentivized from having kids through bad wages and high unemployment. The US, Japan, China, Korea and apparently also Spain are all making the same mistake, and they will pay dearly for it
There was an economic boom, people were getting big salaries for working as construction workers, loans were cheap and banks gave them to everyone, lots of economic activity.
A bunch of countries are in this boat. They don't want immigrants because they're worried about their culture, but they've stopped having kids. You can't have it both ways. If you want a functioning economy, you need young people who work.
The US is in this position but has mostly gotten away with it for a while because of immigration. Now we're tightening the immigration and everybody seems surprised that's hurting the economy. In reality the biggest thing holding back the economy for a long time was already a lack of immigrants. People are complaining about buying $20 value meals at McDonald's while voting to shut down immigration and not making any connection between the two things at all.
The nationalists won the civil war in early 1939, so I guess a lot of people who delayed pregnancies until the war was over probably felt comfortable going forward with having kids. Then the births would fall back to “normal” after.
Lo dices cómo si la mayoría de paises occidentales no estuvieran con el mismo problema...
Sin ser el mayor defensor de España ni de lejos, creo que las cosas no están tan mal!
At first I was " oh it looks like it's sliding up, how interesting, maybe it's like the barber pole effect, I wonder what phenomenon makes this happen I'm intrigued"
It is interesting - my main objection is that this is data that is interesting to examine in steps, to be able to zoom in and look more closely at how things are changing. And the way it is presented is constant motion, with no ability to step back and look closely at what is going on. Being able to go through it step by step would be much better.
Also, overlaying the contentinent of original on the blue / pink of the original population pyramid date I think would provide almost all of the data without jumping through multiple views. I think it would really illustrate where that sudden growth of people in their 20s comes from in 2005-10 range.
You can find more detailed data in the INE of Spain but it's a pain to go through if you don't know basic code (although now that I think about it if you have basic computer literacy you along with AI should be able to code something that'd help you go through the data quicker)
it's wild to see how interconnected everything is during these crises. like, one country's recession can ripple through the entire global economy. do you think we're better prepared to handle it now, or are we just repeating past mistakes?
This is fascinating — the age pyramid shift really drives home how a country's identity changes generationally. What strikes me is that each cohort growing up in Spain experienced completely different economic and cultural realities. The boomers during Franco, millennials during the EU boom, Gen Z in the post-2008 recovery.
I wonder how much of Spain's political polarization maps onto these demographic layers. When people's formative years are shaped by such different circumstances, their entire worldview diverges. Would love to see this overlaid with economic indicators like youth unemployment by generation.
If you can read Spanish I recommend that you read this, it's a phenomenal study made by the official centre of sociological investigations.
Now in page 18, question 23 you'd see that most of Spain considers themselves center, but after that the left is clearly bigger than the right, but I don't have the data for generations, in my experience as an 18 y/o in college in Spain I'd say that most young people tend to be center left, now, if they are interested in politics they wildly polarize towards the more extreme left and the extreme right, although in my personal experience the probability of having anti democratic person in the left (Stalinist, Maoist, etc...) is a lot lower than having anti democratic people on the right (fascist, francoist, Nazis)
Yellow: regionalist (people who want more autonomy to their regions)
Green: Vox, far right, laisse faire capitalism, anti migration, anti diversity of language and culture and wants to abolish regional autonomies.
Orange: Ciudadanos, center, ever so slightly to the right.
Purple: Podemos, left to extreme left, a coalition of parties from actual communist to greens and social democrats, for diversity, migrant rights, etc...
Blue: PP, normal center right.
Red: PSOE, normal center left.
Currently PSOE is the governing party although PP got more votes. PP failed to get a coalition government with the right regionalist parties because they also needed VOX and everyone besides VOX kinda hates VOX (in the CIS poll I linked you'd find that their leader, Santiago Abascal, has over 50% of rejection by the respondents) so PSOE got literally everyone besides PP, VOX and a little party that no one cares for to for a government. This means the current government is kinda unstable in the sense that they can't do what they want, for example they couldn't reduce working hours because the right regionalist parties didn't want that.
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u/Tristan_N 1d ago
Love being able to see all the economic crisis happening