Political leaders in Germany have vowed to push through new policies to encourage Germans to have more children after alarming new data showed the country is at the bottom of the world's birth rate rankings.
Figures issued by the Federal Statistics Office on Friday estimated that the number of children born in Germany in 2005 reflected the lowest birth rates per woman in the European Union and the lowest total since the office began measuring births in 1946.
A separate demographic study published last week by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development put Germany last in the global rankings of births per citizen and predicted the trend would accelerate in coming decades.
