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Fertility rate is the average number of children born to women during their
lifetime in a population during a certain period.
Life expectancy at birth is the average number of years that people born at a
specific moment can expect to live if subjected to the same mortality conditions
of the time of their birth in a population.
Median age is the compiled overall average age of a population at a specific
moment.
Old-age dependency ratio compares the number of those aged 65 or over to the
number of those aged 15-64 in a population at a specific moment.
Replacement level is the fertility rate required in a population to exactly reproduce
its size from one generation to the next, which is defined at 2.1 children per
woman in developed countries.
Box 2: Mini glossary of basic demographic terms
Low birth and fertility rates are accompanied by dropping mortality rates and
rapidly increasing life expectancy across Europe. Life expectancy at birth in
the Union was estimated at 81.3 years in 2019, reaching 84 years for women
and 78.5 years for men.’ Compared to 2002, when these data became available
for all EU Member States for the first time, life expectancy has increased for
both women and men by 2.8 and 3.9 years respectively, or by 3.3 years on
average since (EPRS 2021, 6).
On a broader time horizon, the picture is all the more striking: if you
compare present data to those of the early 1960s (1960-65: average 69.9
years, 72.4 years for women, 67 years for men), you realise that Europeans
live more than a decade longer nowadays than they did just sixty years ago
(EPRS 2021, 7). Extending a populations life expectancy by ten years in
just half a century is an unprecedented achievement in human history, but
without ready-made recipes on how to deal with it. Moreover, this trend is
not expected to abate. Data from the UN 2019 World Population Prospects
suggest that life expectancy in the EU-27 area will exceed 85 years by the
2045-2050, and 90 years by the 2095-2100 period (quoted in EPRS 2021, 7).
Dropping fertility rates plus increasing life expectancy equal a rapidly
ageing society. The median age of the EU-27 population was 38.4 years in
2001, and increased to 43.7 years in 2019 - by 5.3 years in less than two
decades (EPRS 2021, 2). The data ofa median age of 29 years from 1950, and
33 years from the early 1980s make this even more astonishing. Yet, this trend
is not foreseen to abate, either. In fact, the median age in the EU-27 area is
? See Eurostat data at https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php’ title=
Mortality_and_life_expectancy_statistics#Life_expectancy_at_birth (last accessed in
July 2021)