Birth Rates Across Europe
How does birth rates vary across regions in Europe?
I enjoy creating map visualizations, but I haven’t done that many recently.
Today, I found that Eurostat often break down their data on statistical regions called NUTS. There are three levels, each one going deeper than the one before.
Eurostat also provide GeoJSON for these statistical regions, which allows me to create maps using geopandas and matplotlib.
Two datasets that exist for the NUTS 3, the deepest level, are population and birth data.
By combining the two of them, I was able to calculate fertility rates according to standard formulas.
Here’s what I got.
The map show how countries close to the Mediterranean Sea suffer from low fertility rates, sometimes all the way down around 1.
Spain and Italy have some of the lowest value and really need to think about how to handle an aging population.
France show higher values than other countries in central Europe, something I didn’t know before creating this map.
I hope you enjoy this data viusalization.
Let me know what you think and what you want to see next.
Thank you!
The births per woman's lifetime (is this a correct understanding of the the fertility rate shown?) in the country known around theses parts as Turkey has an interesting west to east gradient.