Almost 40% of Portuguese elderly people over 80 years old lived alone in 2021, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), which shows that the majority of elderly people living alone live in parishes in the interior of the country.
The INE presented this Tuesday a series of studies on families in Portugal, based on the 2021 Census, and in which the study on “Families in the most advanced stages of life: current trends” shows “a slight increase in the proportion of individuals aged 65 or over living in single-person households”.
In the analysis by age groups, “37.8% of the population aged 80 or over, in 2021, lived in households without family nuclei”, pointed out researcher Patrícia Coelho, from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Algarve.
According to the teacher, it is in this age group that “the number of elderly people living in single-person households grew much more sharply between 2011 and 2021”.
The data presented show that more than 50% of single-person private households were made up of people aged 65 or over.
The greatest expression is in parishes in the interior (north and center) and in the Autonomous Region of Madeira, as opposed to the parishes on the coast of mainland Portugal and the Autonomous Region of the Azores.
INE data also showed that in the ten years between 2011 and 2021, Portugal lost 1.3% of its resident population and that the effective growth rate was negative until 2018, only reversed from that year onwards thanks to immigration.
Since 2017, migratory growth has been positive, but this alone was not enough to compensate for population loss, a phenomenon that will only begin to occur from 2023 onwards, while the population continues to age.
The birth rate was “strongly” affected by the two crises during that period, the first financial and the second pandemic, which meant that there was only “a slight recovery from 2015 onwards”, which was quickly reversed in 2020.
According to Susana Clemente, from INE, in 2021, the average was 1.35 children per woman of childbearing age, highlighting that “women, in times of crisis, have children later”.
“The effects of the crises affected demographic movements and, consequently, family structures,” he pointed out.
In the trends of couple life, based on data from the INE, it was possible to see that the number of de facto couples increased, with two in every ten couples living in a de facto union, and that “the relative weight of childless couples in the total number of couples increased”, as four in every ten couples are childless couples.
On the other hand, the number of couples with children has decreased and the number of reconstituted couples living in a de facto union has increased. Reconstituted couples are those in which there is at least one child who is not common to both partners.
Source: rr.sapo.pt
