Reacción a "Reactions to study predicting large drop in global fertility rate"

Fertility rates in high-income countries have been declining for decades. Few children have been born for thirty years and, as a result, few women are of childbearing age today. As the article points out, this means that we are facing increasingly ageing societies. This may have economic and social consequences, such as the sustainability of public pension systems and the financing of welfare states. However, given the current scenario, I would not go so far as to say that the welfare state is in danger in the sense that it will disappear, but there will certainly be a change and the system of the future will be very different from the one we know today. There is in fact already a silent transformation towards models in which there is a basic figure, everyone receives the same pension and the extras depend on private pension plans or those established by collective agreements.  

For the Spanish case in particular, the problem is not so much the lack of workers as the low productivity of the Spanish economic system. Spain has a labour market that is very biased towards sectors with low productivity and little added value, as in the case of construction, and there is very little investment in R+D. We currently have the most educated young generations in history, but they are generations that have suffered several economic crises. Moreover, these young people have a very temporary labour market and very low salaries, so their contributions are also very low. So, it is true that demography is not very good for sustaining the current pension system, but it is not the culprit, but rather the lack of political action and the structural conditions of the Spanish labour market aggravate the problem.