The country needs to take urgent, drastic and expensive action to reverse the worrying downward trajectory of its native population numbers, Finance Minister Clyde Caruana told parliament on Wednesday.

Picking up on a public discussion sparked by the presentation of a report by professors Anna Borg and Prof Liberato Camilleri on perceptions towards a work-life balance with a specific focus on family size, the minister said he had done his own research and come up with worrying results.

Malta’s native population was currently 406,000 of whom 24% were aged over 65, he said. In 25 years' time, the native population would be 336,000 with 34% being elderly. And in 50 years time the Maltese population would be just 240,000 of whom 40% would be elderly.

A country could only develop when it had a young population, he said, but the figures for Malta were worrying, with 55% of couples only having one child.

The study by the two professors, as well as his own research, confirmed that a household’s income was a major factor in having children.

He had found from official data that in couples who only had one child, the average age of the father was 32.4 and that of the mother 31.4 when the child was born. Where couples had two children the father was 31 when the first child was born and the mother 29.

Families that decided to only have one child had an average household income of €50,812. Those with two children had a household income average of €58,500.

It was clear that those who had more than one child had a better education, which led to better income, and therefore the option to start having children earlier, and have more than one.  

The question was what could be done to change the trajectory of population decline.

“We need to act now. The growth of the country can only come about on the back of a young well-prepared population and the figures do not show this,” the minister said.

Families needed to be encouraged to have a second child. It was not a question of adding €150 a year to children’s allowance, that only helped them raise their children, not have more.

To be able to have more children, couples needed thousands of euro per year in support, he said, such as a new tax compilation for those having more than one child.

“It will cost many millions (of euro) to make a difference. We need bold, drastic and immediate measures to make a difference, a change that would go down in history for changing the population trajectory,” Caruana said.