Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2023, Vol. 21

While the global population continues to rise, many regions are experiencing population decline due to low fertility, outmigration or, most often, a combination of the two trends – and many more are forecast to do so in the future. Economic and demographic theories have so far been unable to offer an unambiguous prediction regarding the consequences of population decline. The 2023 volume of the Vienna Yearbook, “The causes and consequences of depopulation”, provides a wide variety of perspectives on population decline, illustrating that it is a highly multifaceted issue, and that there are no simple theoretical or empirical applications for understanding its causes and consequences, or the potential responses to it. The Debate contributions provide a broader viewof and reflections on population decline, while also highlighting the benefits and opportunities associated with it, and ways to manage population changes globally. In contrast, the research articles tend to focus on the challenges of shrinking population that are experienced at a local level. This Introduction gives an overview of the contributions in this volume and the different perspectives they offer.

Keywords: population decline, depopulation, ageing, migration

The prospect of population decline in Europe is commonly understood to be an important policy problem. Discussions and research typically focus on the level and the trend of demographic indicators. Can policies be designed which, by targeting the constrained optimisation of rational individuals, cause the indicators to change in the right direction? In this intervention, I argue that like a surrogate marker in medicine, a demographic indicator is not a meaningful endpoint: something that is a direct measure of health or, analogously, a healthy society. Treating population indicators as meaningful endpoints can, as history has shown, lead to great harm. In my view, it is this misconception that makes population decline a truly serious and terrifying problem. So yes, population decline is a problem, but not in the way you, or the people who pose this sort of question, might think.

Keywords: population decline, Fertility, Institutions, surrogate marker

The human enterprise is in overshoot, depleting essential ecosystems faster than they can regenerate and polluting the ecosphere beyond nature’s assimilative capacity. Overshoot is a meta-problem that is the cause of most symptoms of eco-crisis, including climate change, landscape degradation and biodiversity loss. The proximate driver of overshoot is excessive energy and material ‘throughput’ to serve the global economy. Both rising incomes (consumption) and population growth contribute to the growing human eco-footprint, but increasing throughput due to population growth is the larger factor at the margin. (Egregious and widening inequality is a separate socio-political problem.) Mainstream approaches to alleviating various symptoms of overshoot merely reinforce the status quo. This is counter-productive, as overshoot is ultimately a terminal condition. The continuity of civilisation will require a cooperative, planned contraction of both the material economy and human populations, beginning with a personal to civilisational transformation of the fundamental values, beliefs, assumptions and attitudes underpinning neoliberal/capitalist industrial society.

Keywords: overshoot, eco-footprint, carrying capacity, sustainability, population, contraction

Summarising earlier publications, I draw a rather optimistic picture of the human future on this planet, if priority is given to universal education, and, in particular, to female education. The benefits of a greater focus on education range from a lower desired family size and empowerment to reach this goal, to better family health, to poverty reduction, to greater resilience, to expanded capacities to mitigate and adapt to climate change, and, ultimately, to the emergence of better institutions and social values that are less obsessed with material consumption and violent nationalism and more concerned with cooperation, care and wellbeing. I also show that extended periods of below replacement level fertility are beneficial for long-term human wellbeing, and that the human population is on the path to peaking during the second half of this century and then declining to 2–4 billion people by 2200. As this smaller population will be well-educated, they should be healthy and wealthy enough to be able to cope fairly successfully with the already unavoidable (moderate) effects of climate change.

Keywords: population, Climate change, long-term, human capital, female education

Scientists are well aware of the major social, economic and cultural challenges brought about by population decline. However, we can often underestimate the more extreme interpretations of both the causes and the consequences of population decline in the popular discourse. In this commentary, I explore some of these toxic narratives, and speculate about how they may be linked to what appears to be a prevailing populist/ethno-nationalist view of population grounded in political tropes, rather than in scientific reality. Using Armitage’s (2021) concept of “demographic imaginaries”, I argue that much of this public discourse serves several vital purposes: to try to simplify a complex issue; to try to “unify”; to try to blame and scapegoat; and, ultimately, to try to negate the obligation to make tough, complex political and policy decisions. I also argue that scientists working in the field of population decline need to be more aware of these tropes, and should make more active efforts to ground the discourse of population decline in science and reality. I conclude that a bottom-up approach to responding to population decline may be the most fruitful avenue for progress in the future.

Keywords: population decline, depopulation, conspiracy, Fertility, migration, Twitter, Social Media

Much of East Central Europe today faces the double challenge of having a population that is both ageing fast and shrinking steadily. Elderly-oriented political dynamics and myopic governance are part of this predicament, and are also among the reasons why future prospects are not rosy. Having started the post-communist transition with younger populations, successive governments in this region have comprehensively squandered a decades-long window of opportunity to adapt their policies to the predicted ageing ahead (Vanhuysse and Perek-Bialas, 2021). Especially in Hungary, Poland, Czechia, the Slovak Republic, Romania and Bulgaria, this failure is reflected in low active ageing and child well-being index rankings, low levels of social investment and mediocre educational outcomes, and family policies that reinforce traditional motherhood roles or barely support parents at all. Poland, Romania, Croatia, Hungary and, especially, the Baltic states also experienced large-scale emigration (‘young exit’). Slovenia and the Visegrad Four, but not the Baltics, became premature pensioners‘ democracies characterised by unusually high levels of pro-elderly policy bias (‘lopsided loyalty’). While the salience of family policies increased around the time the demographic window closed, this shift was driven by pro-natalist, neo-familialist and gender-regressive political ideologies, rather than by a concerted effort to boost human capabilities or reward social reproduction. But by then, elderly voter power (‘grey voice’) in East Central Europe was among the highest in the world. Politics strongly constrains the likelihood of appropriate human capital-boosting policy responses to the region’s population predicament. Alarm bells thus ring for a generational contract under pressure and for longer-term societal resilience.

Keywords: pro-elderly policy bias, social reproduction, generational contract, pensioner democracies, welfare state resilience, social investment, political demography

The public discourse about the ongoing fertility decline and the spread of low fertility, and the consequences thereof, is often unscientific and emotionally charged. As I argue in my book, Decline and Prosper! (Skirbekk, 2022), low fertility per se does not pose a major societal threat – and it is also accompanied by a number of benefits. In this article, I summarize my main points: namely, that i) the negative consequences of low fertility are often exaggerated and based on false assumptions; ii) low fertility is driven by many different, interacting factors, and is the byproduct or the cause of many positive societal developments; iii) low fertility is here to stay; and iv) societies urgently need to adapt to a world with fewer children. Fertility decline is self-perpetuating: once lowfertility has become the normin one generation, the fertility level is much less likely to increase in subsequent generations. At the same time, no plausible level of migration would be enough to meaningfully alter population aging in the long term. If, however, societies make the right choices, low fertility can enable humans to live more sustainably well into the future, and can stimulate further positive developments in the human condition.

Keywords: global demographic change, low fertility, ageing, population concern

Germany is currently among the 10 oldest countries in the world, as measured by the share of population aged 70 years and over.With the baby boomer cohorts of the 1950s and 1960s having started to reach retirement ages, a new phase of ageing is about to take place. In this debate piece, we argue that investments in human capital at any age and at any stage of the life course are indispensable for dealing with an ageing population. Investments in early education are most effective and efficient, as early skills beget later skills. We show that in an ageing society, it is most efficient to invest in children from the very beginning to develop their full human potential, and to ensure that no child is left behind. Moreover, investments in early education programmes have benefits in addition to those directly related to children, including benefits related to fertility, maternal employment and the integration of parents with a migration background. Globally, more and more countries are faced with increasing proportions of older people and decreasing proportions of working-age people in their populations. Thus, what we describe here for Germany can in many respects be transferred to other country contexts.

Keywords: Population Ageing, human capital, education, early education programmes

The depopulation of rural areas has received increasing attention in recent years, both in scientific discourses and in policy-making. One main factor contributing to this rural shrinkage is the out-migration of the rural population. In particular, young and well-educated people have been leaving rural areas and moving to urban agglomerations. While the drivers as well as the consequences of out-migration have been well researched, less is known about measures to counteract youth outmigration as one of the main drivers of depopulation. Based on a comparative case study conducted in four rural regions affected by youth out-migration in Austria and Germany, this paper discusses policy measures that are specifically targeted at influencing young people’s migration aspirations. In addition, the effects of these measures on rural youth migration are analysed. After implementing measures that take the needs of young people into consideration, all four case study regions started to experience a decrease in their negative youth migration balance. This was mainly due to an increase in in-migration, while youth out-migration rates remained stable. However, these developments follow the general trend of rural youth migration in Austria and Germany in recent years. Thus, more research is needed to evaluate the actual impact of youth-oriented measures. This paper introduces the “youth-oriented regional development” approach, and highlights perspectives for future research on policies aimed at mitigating the challenges facing rural regions that are experiencing depopulation.

Keywords: Rural areas, depopulation, youth migration, regional development, rural policy, research perspectives

A nascent body of scholarship suggests that the depopulation of urban areas may catalyse residential segregation between different population groups and spatial concentrations of vulnerable groups. Based on a systematic literature review, this article summarises peer-reviewed articles and case studies on the role of urban shrinkage in shaping residential segregation in the context of European cities, and highlights methodological shortcomings and empirical knowledge gaps, thereby contributing to our understanding of the mechanisms through which population dynamics influence urban inequalities and their relevance for planning and policy. In sum, studies verifying the frequently assumed positive relationship between urban population loss and widening segregation remain few and far between. Moreover, mismatches between spatial and temporal scales, in addition to the indicators and metrics used in past studies, have hampered not only comparisons of how these dynamics play out in different contexts, but also the integration of spatial justice perspectives into urban planning.

Keywords: Demographic change, depopulation, residential segregation, sociospatial inequalities, spatial justice, urban shrinkage

Between 2009 and 2018, the total fertility rate fell in most European countries. In 2018, fertility was below the replacement level throughout Europe. Net migration was positive for two-thirds of European countries. This paper illustrates the implications for long-run population growth of observed net migration-fertilitymortality combinations in 20 European countries over the 2009–18 period by comparing the observed net migration to a zero population growth-related ‘replacement level’ for net migration. The results show that in several northern and north-western European countries, the net migration level has been consistently above this replacement level: if the net migration level and fertility and mortality rates remain constant, the population would increase. However, the findings also indicate that in all of the eastern European countries covered, the net migration level has been consistently below the net migration replacement level. The results further show that in Finland, Norway and Switzerland, the long-run implications of having constant fertility-mortality-net migration levels change from leading to population growth to leading to population decline. The opposite pattern is observed in Germany. The feasibility of preventing long-run population decreases through changes in net migration levels is discussed in light of the results.

Keywords: migration, population decrease, population growth, Fertility, population model, Europe

Population ageing is a topic of great concern in many countries. To counteract the negative effects of ageing, increased fertility or immigration are often proposed as demographic remedies. Changed emigration is, however, rarely mentioned. We explore whether reduced emigration could mitigate ageing in a country like Norway. Using cohort-component methods, we create hypothetical future demographic scenarios with lower emigration rates, and we present (prospective) old-age dependency ratios, population growth and shares of immigrants. We also estimate howmuch fertility and immigrationwould have to change to yield the same effects. In different scenarios, emigration is reduced for the total population and for subgroups, while also taking into account that reduced emigration of natives will entail reduced return migration. Our results show that even a dramatic 50% decrease in annual emigration would mitigate ageing only slightly, by lowering the old-age dependency ratio in 2060 from 0.54 to 0.52. This corresponds to the anti-ageing effect of 15% higher fertility, or one-quarter extra child per woman.

Keywords: emigration, ageing, population size, population projections, population policy

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to severe population loss as millions exited the country and casualties mounted. However, population decline in Ukraine had been occurring for decades due to the triple burden of depopulation: low fertility, high mortality and substantial emigration. Ukraine had also already experienced years of armed conflict and large-scale displacement after the Russian-backed separatist movement, which started in 2014. This study investigates perspectives on depopulation using online focus groups conducted in July 2021, seven months before the current invasion. We compared discussions in eastern Ukraine, including in rural villages, the IDP-receiving city of Mariupol, the large city of Kharkiv and occupied Donetsk. Participants observed that cities were growing at the expense of rural areas. The situation in Donetsk was bleak due to mass emigration, but some participants pointed to a recent increase in births. Overall, the participants acknowledged the triple burden of depopulation in Ukraine, and the consequences of population decline, such as a shrinking labour force and rapid ageing.

Keywords: depopulation, Ukraine, low fertility, emigration, population decline

Many small Spanish municipalities (those with less than 2000 inhabitants) experienced population growth during the first decade of the 21st century due to a large influx of foreign immigrants. However, the Great Recession put an end to this trend. The first aim of this paper is to analyse the demographic impact of the new phase of economic growth – known as the “post-crisis” period (2014–2020) – on small Spanish municipalities. The second aim is to carry out an initial analysis of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis on the growth of these municipalities. The results of a nine-category typology show that during the post-crisis period, the vast majority of villages continued to depopulate, while a minority gained population or had stagnant population figures. The Covid-19 pandemic represented a turning point, with small municipalities as a whole starting to grow again. However, the population did not increase in all categories of villages or in all regions of rural Spain. The results for both periods (post-crisis and Covid-19 pandemic) highlight the growing importance of migration to demographic change in the smallest municipalities.

Keywords: rural depopulation, post-crisis period, Covid-19 pandemics, small municipalities, Spain

Population trends in Italy are strongly spatially differentiated, with some munic- ipalities showing a systematic loss of population, and others showing an equally continuous demographic increase. Here, we focus our attention on the spatial dimension of population change, looking at how different socio-economic and demographic dimensions affect population changes, as well as their spatial effects. After performing a preliminary descriptive analysis of the trends of population growth and decline in Italy over the last 40 years and the relevant demographic components, we used a spatial Durbin model (SDM) to investigate the potential existence of a diffusion process and the determinants of the average annual growth rate between 2011 and 2019 at the municipal level. The spatial dimension and local heterogeneities in Italy were found to be highly relevant in the analysis of population decline. Moreover, we examined the relationship between demographic, social and economic factors and the demographic growth/decline of municipalities in the subsequent 10 years. Among the different covariates included in the model, the demographic composition of the population, the female activity rate, the youth employment rate and the presence/absence of a school proved to be strongly related to population growth and decline in Italian municipalities.

Keywords: Italy, spatial Durbin model, spatial demography, local analysis, municipalities

Since the Second World War, Italy has experienced major demographic changes, including increasing survival, decreasing fertility and higher rates of immigration. These changes have silently and slowly led to important shifts in the structure and the territorial distribution of the population. Thus, like in many other European countries, population ageing and depopulation have become the most relevant demographic phenomena in Italy. In this paper, we studied the relationship between depopulation and ageing in Italian territories in the 1971–2019 period using the census data of the Italian municipalities and applying spatial techniques. We found that high levels of depopulation later result in high levels of population ageing, and that recent population ageing processes are also connected to ongoing depopulation processes, thereby creating a vicious circle.

Keywords: depopulation, Population Ageing, spatial analysis, Italy

Substantiated knowledge of future demographic changes that is derived from sound statistical and mathematical methods is a crucial determinant of regional planning. Of the components of demographic developments, migration shapes regional demographics the most over the short term. However, despite its importance, existing approaches model future regional migration based on deterministic assumptions that do not sufficiently account for its highly probabilistic nature. In response to this shortcoming in the literature, our paper uses age- and gender-specific migration data for German NUTS-3 regions over the 1995–2019 period and compares the performance of a variety of forecasting models in backtests. Using the bestperforming model specification and drawing on Monte Carlo simulations, we present a stochastic forecast of regional migration dynamics across German regions until 2040 and analyze their role in regional depopulation. The results provide evidence that well-known age-specific migration patterns across the urban-rural continuum of regions, such as the education-induced migration of young adults, are very likely to persist, and to continue to shape future regional (de)population dynamics. [Further supplementary files available via DOI]

Keywords: migration back- and forecasting, regional population decline, multivariate methods, principal component analysis, time series analysis, Monte Carlo Simulation

In Moldova, there has been a long-term decline in the population, mainly due to high levels of emigration. The article presents an analysis of population dynamics in Moldova over the last three decades, and estimates the contributions of fertility, mortality and migration to this process. Using population censuses, data on the population with usual residence, vital statistics and data on Moldovan immigrants from the host countries’ statistical institutes,we estimate population changes between 1991–2021, and present demographic projections up to 2040. The results show that migration outflows account for more than 90% of the depopulation trend, with high levels of premature mortality accelerating the natural decline. The fall in births is associated with a decrease in the reproductive-age population. The total fertility rate has been decreasing gradually, while the cohort fertility rates have not fallen below 1.75 live births per woman. Past migration and low fertility are projected to result in long-term population decline. Demographic ageing is expected to increase. While population decline cannot be stopped, its scale can be limited through reductions in emigration and mortality. This study on population decline in Moldova helps to complete the demographic picture of Europe in the 20th century and into the 21st century.

Keywords: depopulation, Fertility, mortality, migration, demographic projection, Moldova