#demographic-crisis

#demographic-crisis

The Central Statistics Office has been surveying the same group of people born in 1998 since they were nine years old, releasing reports at key moments in their adolescence.

The Bank of Japan's loose monetary policy has turned the yen into the world's cheapest and most reliable funding currency, creating a publicly subsidised funding pipeline for bankers.

After reaching 3,149,131 on Oct. 1, 2024, the number of non-permanent residents living in Canada steadily decreased to 2,676,441 on Jan. 1, 2026. Non-permanent residents include people holding work or study permits as well as asylum claimants and any family members living with them.

Life expectancy in the EU continues to increase, reaching 81.5 years in 2024, 0.1 years more than the previous year and higher than in 2019, the year before the pandemic (81.3). As a reference, at the height of COVID-19, in 2021, the expectation of life had declined to 80.1 years across EU countries.

Gaining citizenship through family or through marriage is possible, but if you don't have any useful relatives or an EU spouse you'll be looking at getting citizenship through residency. From residency requirements to rules on dual nationality, every country in Europe has its own way of tackling naturalisation.

The U.S.'s population growth is slowing as immigration has declined amid President Donald Trump's deportation push and stricter border policies. According to new Census Bureau data, the drop-off is the biggest since the COVID-19 pandemic. From July 2024 to July 2025, the population of the United States grew by 1.8 million people (about 0.5%). This was mostly driven by immigration: During that period, the U.S. added 1.3 million immigrants.

Job vacancies in Britain have fallen to their lowest level in five years, with graduate recruitment bearing the brunt as employers contend with higher payroll costs and the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence. Data from Adzuna show that advertised vacancies dropped to 694,940 in January, down 16 per cent year-on-year and 3 per cent compared with December. It is the first time since January 2021 that the number of vacancies has dipped below 700,000.

For many decades, the Chinese government attempted to limit population growth through a one-child policy - only to abolish the rule in 2016 as it realized that the number of annual births had started to plummet at alarming levels. The aggressive policy - alongside other extreme measures - succeeded far too well, with birth rates dropping a staggering 17 percent between 2024 and 2025 to the lowest level since 1949.

U.S. President Donald Trump, with his lust for Greenland and hectoring of Europe, thinks the world is at his mercy,and thatthe U.S. is invincible. He's right on the first point. But he discovered this week that he's wrong about the second one. In Davos at the World Economic Forum, Trump climbed down on his Greenland threats after his actions caused chaos in the markets.

For the first time since the end of the second world war, France has recorded more deaths than births, suggesting that the country's long-held demographic advantage over other EU countries is slipping away. Across the country in 2025, there were 651,000 deaths and 645,000 births, according to newly released figures from the national statistics institute Insee. France had long been an exception across Europe, with birthrates that topped many of its neighbours'.

On Wednesday Brussels is due to outline the terms of the 90bn loan it has promised to Ukraine, amid internal tensions over whether Kyiv can use the money to buy US as well as EU weapons. On the same day, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is due to meet ministers from Denmark and Greenland, as Donald Trump continues to insist that the US will take ownership of the latter one way or another.

In a classroom in Chennai, India, around 20 nurses are learning German at breakneck speed. They have six months to become fluent enough to work in Germany. Ramalakshi, one of the nurses, says her family struggled financially, but still managed to pay the equivalent of several thousand euros for her nursing college. Ever since completing her education, she felt the need to give back.

Guten Morgen from a wet and dreary Bonn. We are expecting the five suspects who were arrested on Monday on suspicion of violating sanctions against Russia to appear in court today and we will be looking into a new report about poverty in Germany. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is also expected to host a carnival reception at the Chancellery in Berlin, which will hopefully provide some interesting pictures. For this and more, keep reading.