Population
Sections
Highlight
Sections
Highlight
Cristina Vallejo
Malaga
Tuesday, 10 September 2024, 13:17
Opciones para compartir
In Malaga province there are currently 245,491 children under the age of fifteen. It is a fact that, despite the fall in the birth rate as there are now fewer births than ever before, this figure is higher than two decades ago. In July 2004 there were just over 227,300 children under 15. This means that the child population has grown by 8% over the last 20 years in the province, according to data from the continuous population survey run by INE (Spain's national statistics institute).
In short: there are more children living in Malaga province today than there were 20 years ago. This phenomenon has only occurred in one other region of Andalucía, namely Almeria, where the number of children has increased twice as much as in the Costa del Sol province: 17.30%, rising from 102,224 in July 2004 to almost 120,000 this year. In contrast, the under-15 population in Seville has fallen by almost 6% in the same period to the current total of 281,685 children, in Granada by more than 10%, in Cadiz by almost 14% and in Jaen, the Spanish province most affected by this demographic parameter, it has plummeted by almost 30% from around 112,000 children in 2004 to just over 78,300 today.
Taking into account what has happened in this handful of other Andalusian provinces, it is understandable that children from Malaga province represent 20% of all those living in Andalucía. In other words, out of every five Andalusian children one of them lives in Malaga province. In the last two decades the number of children in the whole region has fallen by 7%, from 1.28 million to less than 1.20 million.
Nationally the number of children under the age of 15 has increased, but to a lesser extent than they have in Malaga, barely 2.6% in the last two decades (from 6.2 million in 2004, now 6.36 million). Guadalajara is the province where the child population has grown the most at no less than 36% in the last 20 years, going from around 30,000 to close to 41,000.
The overall picture for the whole country shows that the number of children has grown in 23 of Spain's 50 provinces in the last two decades, as well as in the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa, while it has fallen in the remaining 27 provinces. Malaga is in 19th place in the ranking for the increase in the child population. This falls into line with another population statistic: the provinces with the greatest growth in the child population tend to be those in which the population as a whole has increased the most.
Guadalajara is the province in Spain where the number of children has increased the most in the last two decades (36%) and where the total number of inhabitants has also grown the most (43%). Meanwhile, Almeria is the eighth province in terms of child population growth (17.3%) and is fifth in terms of total population growth (30%). For its part, Malaga is higher in the ranking for overall population growth: it is the seventh province with the highest population growth (27%) in the last 20 years, but it only ranks in 19th place for the increase in the number of resident children.
Juan José Natera, geography professor at the University of Malaga (UMA), explained that behind these figures for Malaga there is a very relevant factor, namely that the province not only attracts population, but also migrants both from other provinces and from other countries. Migrants arrive in this region, settle, stay, form a family unit and have children.
245,491 Children under 15
Reside in Malaga province: 8% more than 20 years ago but 6.7% less than in 2014
In turn, Luis Manuel Ayuso, sociology professor at UMA, said that this arrival of people not only from other countries but also from other Spanish provinces explained another of the keys as to why there are more children in Malaga now than 20 years ago - more women of childbearing age (aged 15-49). INE data shows that in 2004 there were 371,300 women in this age group and, 20 years later, there are more than 400,000, that makes almost 8.7% more. This means that the reproductive pattern today is very similar to that of 2004, the sole difference being that there are now more women, a contingent that has been fuelled by the arrival on the Costa del Sol of people from other lands. However, in Spain as a whole, the number of women has dropped in the last 20 years by just over 4%.
In any case it should be noted that, despite the number of children in Malaga having increased over 20 years, the rate of growth has been lower than that of the total population. The latter has increased by the aforementioned 27.75% between 2004 and 2024, a period in which the number of inhabitants of the province has risen from 1.39 million to almost 1.78 million.
As a result, the proportion of children in the population as a whole has fallen from 16.33% in 2004 to 13.81% today. What does this mean? Well, if 20 years ago, out of every 100 inhabitants of the province, slightly more than 16 were under the age of fifteen, 20 years later less than 14 out of every 100 are children. In Spain as a whole children account for 13% of the total population, also down from 14.5% two decades ago. Across the country only Melilla is the place where children under the age of 14 make up the greatest proportion of the population. There they account for 20%, one fifth of the population, so one out of every five people has not reached the age of 15. At the other extreme is Zamora, where under-15s do not even represent 9% of the total.
27.75% Growth
This is how much the total population in the province of Malaga has increased since 2004, almost 20 points more than growth in the under-15 population.
So, there are more children than 20 years ago, although they occupy a lower proportion of the total population and the number of births has been falling in Malaga. In 2004 there were 16,588 births, 10 years later there were 15,671 and in 2023 they were down to 11,890. In addition, there is another metric which shows how the birth rate is decreasing and which also suggests that the number of children is doomed to decrease and also that the average age of under-15s is rising. Two decades ago the number of children in the different groups into which the INE breaks them down were similar (those aged zero to four were around 77,000, fives to nines were just over 71,700 and those aged ten to 14 were 78,760). Juan José Natera explained that this evolution is a reflection of the graph that shows the swings in the number of births in the province: after falling between 1975 and the end of the nineties the birth rate rose again in the first decade of this century, which is why we have more children currently reaching the age of 14. The birth rate fell again from the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, and this is why we see the fall in the numbers for the youngest children.
At the national level, the situation is similar: while in 2004 the different age cohorts of children numbered around two million apiece, today there are almost 2.5 million children aged 10 to 14, 2.16 million children aged five to nine and only 1.73 million children aged zero to four.
The numbers of children in Malaga continue to hold up better than in other parts of Spain. For this to be possible it is very important that it remains a province capable of attracting people from other provinces as well as from other countries. Moreover, a higher number of children born to each woman is attributed to migrants, although Natera points out that the figures for foreigners and locals are beginning to converge. Be that as it may, in Malaga, according to the Andalusian statistics service (IECA), more than 30% of babies born have at least one foreign parent, eight points more than in Andalucía as a whole (22%).
However, cracks are appearing in Malaga's demographic resilience. If we zoom in and limit the analysis to what has happened over a shorter period of time, we can see that the province has already been losing its child population for years. Let's reduce the time horizon from the last 20 years to the last decade. The number of children in Malaga reached its highest level in 2014 when there were more than 263,000. From then on the numbers began to fall back and 10 years later they are 6.7% less than at the 2014 peak. Yet the population growth as a whole has continued its positive inertia: the almost 1.78 million inhabitants in Malaga province in July 2024 are nearly 10% more than the 1.62 million in 2014.
With births falling and the number of children also declining over the last 10 years, the population of Malaga is holding up and growing due to the increase in the foreign population. The figures bear witness to this: in the last two decades the total number of inhabitants of the province has grown by 27.75%, but while those born in Spain have increased by 12.4%, rising from 1.21 to 1.36 million in the last twenty years, those born in other countries have more than doubled, rising from 180,000 to over 415,000. If we look at the last decade, the number of people born in Spain has grown by 3%, while those of foreign origin have increased by nearly 40%. That said, both locals and foreigners are easing up on their reproductive habits at the same time. Data from IECA reveal that between 2009 and 2023 births to Spanish parents have fallen by 40% and those with a parent of foreign origin have already dropped by nearly 14%.
Publicidad
Publicidad
Publicidad
Publicidad
Reporta un error en esta noticia
Necesitas ser suscriptor para poder votar.