In Hungary, 85,200 children were born in 2023, and 127,200 people died last year, as reported by the KSH. This implies that if there were no immigration or emigration, the population of the country would have been 9,557,000 people on the last day of the year. However, due to a higher number of people moving into the country than leaving, the population stood at 9,580,000 at the end of December.

The most striking figure at first glance is that there has never been a year when so few children were born as now. The previous record low was in 2011 with 88,049 births, with the current figures nearly three thousand less than that. In 2022, there were three thousand more births than in 2023, and in 2021, nearly eight thousand more. (A methodological note: the KSH typically rounds the year-end figures to the nearest hundred, which is why annual summaries appear with such round numbers. The data will be finalized in the next couple of months, as all the December birth and death documents are reported to the statistical office, but significant changes are not expected after this.)

However, it is more insightful to view these figures in relation to the population size because, naturally, when the population was higher by 500,000, there were more births. In this light, 2023 saw 8.9 births per thousand residents, which is the second-worst result ever recorded, only surpassing the 8.8 births per thousand residents in 2011.

At this point, it's important to look at the total fertility rate, which shows the average number of children borne by a woman over her lifetime. The government has touted improvements, comparing the worst year of the past decades, the 1.27 total fertility rate in 2011, to the highest, the 1.59 in 2021. In contrast, the indicator already decreased to 1.52 in 2022, and then to 1.50 in 2023.

In Hungary, the replacement level fertility rate of 2.1, which is necessary for population stability, was last achieved in 1977. Since then, the figures have been consistently higher year-on-year over the past decade than the numbers between 1997 and 2013, indicating some progress. (However, as we've shown, nearly every Central European country has undergone a similar trajectory in birth rates since 1960, so the overall picture is even more complex than simply attributing progress to government actions and declines to their faults.) The intriguing question for the coming years will be whether the decreases seen in 2022 and 2023 signal the start of a trend or just a temporary dip.

Whichever statistic is considered, one thing appears certain: the minimal growth seen in previous years has come to an end, and existing family support measures in their current form are unlikely to significantly boost the desire to have children. This is not entirely surprising, as research by Tárki summarizing several decades indicates that decisions to have a first child have never really been made based on current family policy, with governments mainly influencing whether a couple with two children decide to have a third.

DEATHS: WE HAVE RETURNED TO PRE-COVID NUMBERS

On the demographic statistics' mortality side, there has been a notable improvement compared to our previous decades. The number of deaths was last this low in 2016. Since 2001, with a few exceptions and the Covid period, the annual number of deaths fluctuated between 128,000 and 132,000, with the current number of 127,200 deaths an appreciably low figure. When examining per capita death rates since the country's population has also decreased in the meantime, the 13.3 deaths per thousand residents means we have returned to the levels where we were during the 2010s (the same as the pre-pandemic last year, 2019), with an improvement compared to 2022.

It is logical to ask why this is the case it would be quite naïve to assume that the Hungarian healthcare system improved significantly. Many demographers and health experts will continue to seek answers, but so far, the improvement has often been explained by the likelihood that many individuals who succumbed to Covid in 2020 and 2021 would have died during the recent period without the pandemic.

The number of marriages has grown significantly in recent years, likely boosted by the government tying nearly every form of family support to marriage. However, this momentum has now waned, with 50,150 marriages in 2023. This is a significant decrease compared to the 63,000 to 72,000 figures reported from 2019 to 2022, with the latest number representing a 21.6 percent drop.

It is not necessary to interpret this decrease as a serious drama: it's likely that in recent years, many couples who had been living together for a long time formalized their relationships, but now there seems to be a shortage of such longstanding partnerships.