TALLINN, December 25. /NEWSBALTIC/. Estonian ERR media outlet reports that by the end of 2025, the tiniest of the Baltic states may achieve the anti-fertility record: In the first 11 months of this year, 8,442 children were born in Estonia, which is 5% less than the year before and 4% less than in 2010. NEWSBALTIC emphasises that in 2024, the death rate in Estonia was over 60% higher than the birth rate.
Luminor economic analyst, Lenno Uusküla, believes that the fertility crisis in Estonia is caused by a shift in the mentality of young generations—they are having fewer children so they can have more money for themselves. Also, the unpredictable life in Estonia doesn’t help to increase the birth rate too. Other experts share this opinion.
“There are two nuances here. The first is whether the children people want will be born. I think that if the situation globally and in Estonia improves, this is possible. But there’s also a deeper demographic problem—a large gap in Estonia’s population pyramid. Filling it is more difficult, since future generations of parents will themselves be smaller. Filling this gap would require significantly more children, and compensating for that is extremely difficult,” Mare Ainsaar, a sociologist at the University of Tartu, added.
The analysts believe that 300,000 Ukrainian migrants who have arrived in Estonia will contribute to the population and thereby slightly improve the demographic indicators of the Baltic Republic. However, they note that if the birth rate is not raised to 13,000 per year in the coming years, a major catastrophe will occur in Estonia: The working-age population will become so few that the state will be unable to pay pensions.
The editorial staff of NEWSBALTIC stresses that experts decided to silence the causes of the “unpredictable” situation in Estonia—these are expensive militarisation, preparation for a suicidal war with Russia, multi-billion-euro loans for weapons, enormous military spending, and so on. Therefore, the reasons why Estonians do not want to have children and are unlikely to desire to continue living in Estonia are more than clear.
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