According to Insee’s 2018 demographic report, there are nearly 67 million of us in France, the number of births has dropped and women live longer than men.
INSEE published the 2018 demographic report on Tuesday, reporting on the population census of the past year. Very precisely, we are currently 66,993,000 inhabitants in France. The year 2018 therefore recorded a population increase of 0.30%, although the number of births fell for the fourth consecutive year.
A drop in births
“In 2018, 758,000 babies were born in France, 12,000 less than in 2017, specifies the INSEE report. The total fertility rate stood at 1.87 children per woman in 2018. It has been falling for four years, but the decline is slowing. It is back to its 2002 level.
Indeed, last year, 758,000 babies were born on French soil, i.e. 12,000 fewer births than in 2017. The birth rate has been falling every year for the past four years, but at a slowing rate: – 14,000 births in 2017, – 15,000 in 2016 and – 20,000 in 2015. 40 years), and this since the mid-1990s: they are 8.4 million in 2018, against 8.8 million in 2008 and 9.1 million in 1998″. Another interesting fact: the average age at childbearing is growing steadily: it reached 30.6 years in 2018, compared to 29.8 years ten years earlier. The most fertile women are those between 25 and 34 years old. However, the fertility rate of women aged 25 to 29 has been falling since the 2000s and this decline has accelerated since 2015.
France also recorded 614,000 deaths in 2018, 8,000 more than the previous year. Figures due to “the arrival of numerous generations of baby boom at high mortality ages, the number of deaths has tended to increase since the early 2010s.”
Women have a better life expectancy
“Life expectancy at birth is 85.3 years for women and 79.4 years for men. France is one of the European countries where women live the longest, while it is only in ninth position for men”, indicates INSEE. In France, the gap in life expectancy between women and men was 5.9 years in 2018. It increased slightly compared to 2017 (5.8 years) after several years of convergence (6.7 years in 2008, 7.7 years in 1998).
Figures that the medical profession struggles to explain. In the scientific literature, researchers point to the role of female hormones which have protective properties on blood circulation and strengthen the immune system, or even the fact that women have a double X chromosome, unlike men who do not. only have one. But no researcher can explain with certainty why women live longer on average than men.
Unions in France
As for couples, 235,000 marriages were recorded in 2018, including 6,000 between people of the same sex. For more than twenty years, the age of the married couple has been increasing every year for marriages between people of different sexes: in 2018, women marry on average at 36.0 years old and men at 38.4 years old. In ten years, women marry on average 2.7 years later and men 2.3 years later.
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