Plagued by high unemployment and a shaky economy, Germany is seeing one of its lowest birth rates in years, taking the country to almost the bottom of the world's birth rate ranking.

German political leaders have vowed to push through new policies to encourage Germans to have more children, to stop this trend from growing.

Figures issued by the Federal Statistics Office estimate 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 study published last week by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development put the country last in the global rankings of births per citizen.