A divorce statistics catechism

Given the furious exchanges over statistics, some readers may find this (necessarily highly selective) mosaic of question and answer useful.

1. Is Malta’s rate of marriage breakdown in a different league from the rest of Europe?

No. Using a standard measure, the “crude divorce rate”, Malta is low but mainstream when compared with Eurostat figures for 2006. Its rate (including the total number of legal separations, divorces and annulments per 1,000 population in 2008) is 1.8. This puts it at the higher end of the bottom third of the EU-27. It is fractionally below the eurozone average of 1.9 and the EU-27 average of 2.0.

2. But isn’t Malta’s breakdown rate some eight per cent while the low-end ballpark figure for Europe is 30 per cent (with one or two exceptions)?

Those two figures mix oranges with pears. The Maltese figure is the total number of people with a registered marital breakdown expressed as a percentage of the total married population. The “divorce rates” of other countries are based on entirely different measurements (most crudely by dividing the number of divorces for a given year by the number of marriages; most rigorously by the “life table technique” of following a cohort of marriages for, say, 20 years and seeing how many remain intact over that period).

3. What about the Nationalist Party’s statement that 92 per cent of Maltese marriages are stable?

That figure is simply another way of expressing the eight per cent result. It lumps together the marriage of octogenarians married five decades ago with the marriage of 20-somethings married five months ago. To understand stability, one needs the sense of a trend, which one derives by breaking marriages into cohorts of age, duration, class, etc. Our figures for the trend of referendum voting preferences are far more sophisticated than our figures for the substantive issues themselves.

4. Would the introduction of a divorce law in itself contribute to a higher rate of marital breakdowns?

Very likely, yes. Discounting a short-term spike in divorces, which reflects pent-up demand, one study showed that, in the long term, no-fault divorce contributed to 20 per cent of the increase in European divorce rates between 1960-2002. But divorce rates rose mainly for other reasons, social, cultural and economic, which were present independently of divorce legislation.

5. But isn’t Malta likely to resemble the case of Ireland, which has one of the lowest divorce rates in the world?

It is unwise to be categorical one way or the other but prudent to suppose that Malta is different from Ireland. Our 2008 marital breakdown figure is double Ireland’s for 2005. “Catholic culture” is a woolly category of comparison since other countries have a “Catholic culture” but rather higher divorce rates (or else low rates, like Spain and Italy, but also low rates of marriage). And other factors may be salient too: for example, the birth rate. Ireland has the highest European birth rate, Malta the lowest. The divoce rate of Irish families with only one child is up to a third higher than for other families.

6. Does divorce have the same impact on children as separation and annulment?

Yes. But two other factors, working in opposite directions, need to be kept in mind. On the one hand, if a divorce law contributes to raising the marital breakdown rate, then it renders more children vulnerable. On the other hand, while second marriages tend to be more fragile, even high rates of fragility – such as the UK’s 66 per cent – indicate that a third of such marriages succeed and may make a significant difference to the children born of them, seeing that cohabitation is the most fragile partnership of all.

7. Is divorce universally linked to lower rates of marriage?

Historically, divorce has accompanied high rates of marriage. Even in contemporary Europe, some statistics are surprising: Malta’s “crude marriage rate” is lower than Denmark’s (a rate of 6.7 compared with our 6.3) – as well as that of Cyprus, Romania and Latvia.

8. Is divorce linked to poverty?

Households that split their assets and single-person households tend to struggle more than others. In very unequal societies, like the US and UK, they do worse. If moving house (after selling the family home) means moving to an area where the educational and health services are worse, the problems are exacerbated for the children.

9. Would the introduction of divorce lead to a new form of poverty in Malta?

No, for two reasons. First, if in Malta household break-up is linked to poverty, then we should already have it. At most, a divorce law would increase this poverty (if it raises the rate of marital breakdown). It might also make first families more vulnerable than those second families based on remarriage but this would substitute the current vulnerability of second families based on cohabitation.

Second, the spread of poverty depends on the kind of welfare state we have. In the mid-1990s – during the Clinton boom and social reforms in favour of single mothers – 53 per cent of US single mothers lived in poverty. The classic Scandinavian welfare state avoided this. In the same period, only six per cent of Swedish single mothers lived in poverty. Income redistribution reduced US poverty by five per cent, Swedish poverty by 81 per cent.

Of course, Sweden had high rates of income tax. In Malta, all political parties have declared they would like to see income tax reduced. No country has so far managed to combine a low income-tax regime with generous income redistribution. The Clinton-era statistics show that growing the economy is not enough.

ranierfsadni@europe.com