Demographic change and work in Europe

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Relevant features of demographic change in Europe

Demographic development is constituted by the interplay of three factors: fertility, mortality and migration. The first two are usually referred to as ‘natural’ factors.

Fertility

The most relevant indicator measuring fertility is the so-called ‘total fertility rate’ (TFR). This indicator is defined by Eurostat in the Demographic statistics section of its Concepts and Definitions Database (CODED) as:

The mean number of children that would be born alive to a woman during her lifetime if she were to pass through her childbearing years conforming to the fertility rates by age of a given year. This rate is therefore the completed fertility of a hypothetical generation, computed by adding the fertility rates by age for women in a given year.

The TFR is a standardised indicator that allows a comparison of fertility rates between different countries. It is also used to indicate the so-called ‘replacement level fertility’ (RLF), which is defined as the level of fertility at which a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next. In developed countries, the RLF can be taken as requiring an average of 2.1 children per woman.

The absolute number of children being born also depends on the size of cohorts of women of childbearing age. If there are many women in these cohorts, even a low TFR may result in a relatively high number of children being born, thus ‘hiding’ the long-term effects of a low TFR. Exactly this seems to have happened in Europe since the 1960s.

As shown in Table 1, the TFR was above the RLF of 2.1 in all EU27 countries (except Hungary) in the 1960s. This situation has changed radically with nine EU countries below the RLF in the 1970s, 22 countries below the RLF in the 1980s and all EU27 countries below the RLF since the mid-1990s. Only a handful of countries within the European Union report fertility rates anywhere near the replacement level in 2006, despite the small recovery in the TFR during latter years.

Table 1: Total fertility rates in the EU, 1960–2006

	1960–1964	1970–1974	1980–1984	1990–1994	1995–1999	2000–2004	2006
EU27	2.64	2.23	1.79	1.56	1.47	1.46	1.53
AT	2.78	2.08	1.61	1.49	1.39	1.38	1.40
BE	2.64	2.07	1.61	1.62	1.58		1.74
BG	2.23	2.16	2.01	1.57	1.18	1.24	1.37
CY	3.47	2.38	2.46	2.35	1.85	1.54	1.47
CZ	2.22	2.14	2.01	1.72	1.18	1.17	1.33
DE	2.64	1.77	1.48	1.32	1.33	1.35	1.32
DK	2.58	1.97	1.44	1.73	1.76	1.76	1.83
EE		2.13	2.12	1.67	1.33	1.39	1.55
EL	2.25	2.33	2.02	1.37	1.27	1.27	1.39
ES	2.86	2.87	1.94	1.30	1.17	1.27	1.38
FI	2.68	1.64	1.68	1.82	1.75	1.75	1.84
FR	2.83	2.36	1.88	1.72	1.80	1.90	2.00
HU	1.88	2.01	1.82	1.77	1.40	1.30	1.34
IE	3.91	3.84	2.92	1.99	1.89	1.93	1.90
IT	2.50	2.37	1.55	1.28	1.21	1.27	1.35
LT	2.57	2.28	2.04	1.86	1.49	1.29	1.31
LU	2.33	1.77	1.48	1.65	1.72	1.66	1.65
LV		2.01	2.01	1.70	1.18	1.24	1.35
MT	3.16	2.21	1.98	2.02			1.41
NL	3.17	2.15	1.52	1.59	1.58	1.73	1.70
PL	2.76	2.24	2.33	1.93	1.51	1.27	1.27
PT	3.16	2.71	2.05	1.53	1.46	1.46	1.35
RO	2.10	2.65	2.18	1.55	1.39	1.30	1.31
SE	2.30	1.90	1.64	2.04	1.57	1.64	1.85
SI	2.25	2.14	1.91	1.38	1.25	1.23	1.31
SK	2.93	2.50	2.29	1.94	1.42	1.22	1.24
UK	2.86	2.20	1.81	1.78	1.71	1.68	1.84

Source: European Commission, 2009

Within the EU there are roughly two groups of countries:

• those with a moderately low fertility (in the range of 1.6–1.9 births per woman) including Belgium, France, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries and the UK;
• those with very low fertility (in the range of 1.5 births or less) including the southern and eastern European countries of the EU as well as Austria and Germany and.

Despite the more than 40% decline in the TFR between the 1960s and 2006, the number of live births ‘only’ fell from 7.6 million in 1965 to 5.2 million in 2006, with the number of births increasing slightly during the last years of this period.

Mortality

The European Commission Demography report 2008: Meeting social needs in an ageing society (3.16MB PDF) points out that:

... one of the most impressive socio-economic achievements of developed societies has been the marked reduction in mortality or, in other words, the large increase in life expectancy. (p. 53)

Despite the fact that statistics do not cover all current Member States for the whole period of time, there is a consensus among experts that there has been a continuous (and, in historical terms, dramatic) increase in life expectancy in Europe since the 1950s which is still continuing (Table 2).

Table 2: Life expectancy in Europe, 1960–2007

	1960	1970	1980	1990	2000	2007
AT		70.12	72.73	75.83	78.35	80.39
BE	69.72	71.00	73.27	76.17	77.86	79.89
BG	69.30	71.24	71.06	71.21	71.64	73.00
CY					77.73	80.03
CZ	70.66	69.59	70.39	71.47	75.13	77.02
DE	69.21	70.71	73.13	75.44	78.31	80.09
DK			74.18	74.90	76.87	78.40
EE				69.90	70.78	73.12
EL		73.84	75.28	77.07	78.01	79.42
ES			75.42	76.99	79.35	81.05
FI			73.70	75.06	77.76	79.57
FR					79.16
HU	68.10	69.25	69.12	69.38	71.85	73.61
IE				74.80	76.58	79.75
IT				77.10	79.92
LT		71.08	70.53	71.46	72.19	70.92
LU			72.84	75.66	78.04	79.52
LV						71.16
MT			70.40		78.37	79.93
NL				77.09	78.19	80.42
PL				70.71	73.83	75.36
PT	63.97	66.71	71.46	74.08	76.71	79.13
RO		68.15	69.20	69.86	71.18	73.24
SE		74.73	75.79	77.68	79.77	81.09
SI				73.93	76.15	78.42
SK	70.30	69.84	70.44	71.07	73.30	74.55
UK					77.98

Source: Eurostat dataset ‘Life expectancy by sex and age’ (selection), 2009

Again, there are considerable differences between the 27 EU Member States (EU27), of which the most obvious is the remarkably lower life expectancy in the new Member States from Eastern Europe.

It is well-known that women have a longer life expectancy than men. In 2004 (the last time the data were available for all EU27 countries), women lived on average 6.3 years longer than men (81.5 vs. 75.2 years).

In the past, the reduction of live births was overcompensated by the fact that, on average, people lived longer. Therefore, the natural population change has been positive in the EU27 over the last decades, though not in all individual Member States. However, it is easy to see that this natural growth of the population cannot be sustainable because of the long-term effects of the reduced TFR.

Migration

Since the 1990s, migration has been the most important factor influencing the size of the population in the EU27 – much more than natural population growth. Whereas, in 2007, natural population growth in the EU27 accounted for a growth in the population of 483,538 people, net immigration led to a growth in the population of the EU27 of 2,101,579 people – that is more than four times greater than the natural population change. The Commission’s ‘Demography report 2008’ (p. 62) points out that ‘the EU has thus become a major destination for global migration flows, surpassing even the US.’

Migration from other EU27 countries as well as from third countries has resulted in a considerable number of non-nationals living in EU Member States. As shown in Table 3, these non-nationals are quite unevenly distributed among EU27 countries.

Table 3: EU27 population by citizenship, 1 January 2007

		Of which non-nationals		As % of total population		Acquisitions of citizenship in 2006
	Total population	Non-EU27	EU27	Non-EU27	EU27	Total	As % of third-country nationals
AT	8,298,923	550,129	275,884	6.6	3.3	25,746	4.7
BE	10,584,534	300,816	631,345	2.8	6.0
BG	7,679,290	21,690	3,800	0.3	0.0	6,738	31.1
CY	778,684	47,184	70,900	6.1	9.1
CZ	10,287,189	186,370	109,866	1.8	1.1	2,346	1.3
DE	82,314,906	4,788,792	2,467,157	5.8	3.0	124,566	2.6
DK	5,447,084	196,877	81,219	3.6	1.5	7,961	4.0
EE	1,342,409	229,709	6,700	17.1	0.5	4,781	2.1
EL	11,171,740	729,840	157,700	6.5	1.4	1,962	0.3
ES	44,474,631	2,856,796	1,749,678	6.4	3.9	62,375	2.2
FI	5,276,955	79,277	42,462	1.5	0.8	4,433	5.6
FR	63,392,140	2,369,540	1,280,500	3.7	2.0	147,868	6.2
HU	10.066,158	66,827	101,046	0.7	1.0	6,101	9.1
IE	4,312,526	141,156	311,150	3.3	7.2	5,763	4.1
IT	59,131,287	2,332,734	606,188	4.0	1.0	35,266	1.4
LV	2,281,305	426,687	6,264	18.7	0.3	18,964	4.4
LT	3,384,879	37,354	2,333	1.1	0.1	467	1.3
LU	476,187	27,227	170,986	5.7	35.9	1,128	4.1
MT	407,810	4,610	9,261	1.1	2.3	474	10.3
NL	16,357,992	437,014	244,918	2.7	1.5	29,089	6.7
PL	38,125,479	30,955	23,928	0.1	0.1	989	3.2
PT	10,599,095	339,295	95,600	3.2	0.9	3,627	1.1
RO	21,565,119	20,095	5,974	0.1	0.0	29	0.1
SE	9,113,257	266,509	225,487	2.9	2.5	51,239	19.2
SI	2,010,377	50,549	3,006	2.5	0.1.	3,204	6.3
SK	5,393,637	12,912	19,218	0.2	0.4	1,125	8.7
UK	60,852,828	2,203,028	1,456,900	3.6	2.4	154,015	7.0

Source: European Commission, 2009

Future demographic scenario

In March 2008, Eurostat published population projections for 2008–2060 (EUROPOP2008) for EU Member States, Norway and Switzerland (Giannakouris, 2008). EUROPOP2008 is based on a mandate from the Economic and Financial Affairs Council (ECOFIN) which uses it as the basis for calculating projections of public expenditure related to population ageing in the EU. Its projections offer an insight into the possible future population development in individual Member States, taking into account socioeconomic and cultural differences among them. The main finding of the projection is that ‘without the assumed net migration inflow, Europe’s population would start shrinking from 2012 onwards’ (European Commission, 2009, p. 70).

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• ID: EU0902019D
• Author: Rainer Trinczek
• Institution: FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg
• Country: EU Level
• Language: EN
• Publication date: 16-12-2010
• Subject: Ageing and work