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Vienna Institute of Demography (Ed.)
Vienna Yearbook of Population Research 2023
The causes and consequences of depopulation
 Pieter Vanhuysse
S. 69 
Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften doi: 10.1553/p-5gkf-6kn3
Abstract:
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.
pro-elderly policy bias; social reproduction; generational contract; pensioner democracies; welfare state resilience; social investment; political demography Published Online:
2023/04/19 08:51:34 Object Identifier:
0xc1aa5576 0x003e3099
Rights:https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Introduction
Population decline: Towards a rational, scientific research agenda
Zuzanna Brzozowska, Ekaterina Zhelenkova and Stuart Gietel-Basten
Debate
Like high cholesterol, population decline is a problem, but not in the way you might think...
Wendy Sigle
The human eco-predicament: Overshoot and the population conundrum
William E. Rees
Population decline will likely become a global trend and benefit long-term human wellbeing
Wolfgang Lutz
Depopulation or population decline? Demographic nightmares and imaginaries
Stuart Gietel-Basten
A governance perspective on East Central Europe’s population predicament: Young exit, grey voice and lopsided loyalty
Pieter Vanhuysse
Low, but not too low, fertility can represent a positive development
Vegard Skirbekk
The key role of early education in an ageing and shrinking population: The example of Germany
Elke Loichinger - C. Katharina Spiess
Perspectives
Implementing youth-oriented policies: A remedy for depopulation in rural regions?
Martina Schorn
Review Articles
Revisiting the impact of urban shrinkage on residential segregation in European cities
David Huntington
Research Articles
Immigration and the prospects for long-run population decreases in European countries
Nick Parr
How much would reduced emigration mitigate ageing in Norway?
Marianne Tønnessen - Astri Syse
The triple burden of depopulation in Ukraine: examining perceptions of population decline
Brienna Perelli-Harris - Yuliya Hilevych
Is Spanish depopulation irreversible? Recent demographic and spatial changes in small municipalities
Fernando Gil-Alonso - Jordi Bayona-i-Carrasco - Isabel Pujadas-Rúbies
Neighbourhood effects and determinants of population changes in Italy: A spatial perspective
Federico Benassi - Annalisa Busetta - Gerardo Gallo - Manuela Stranges
Demographic sustainability in Italian territories: The link between depopulation and population ageing
Cecilia Reynaud - Sara Miccoli
Parsimonious stochastic forecasting of international and internal migration on the NUTS-3 level – an outlook of regional depopulation trends in Germany
Patrizio Vanella - Timon Hellwagner - Philipp Deschermeier
Data and Trends
Depopulation in Moldova: The main challenge in the context of extremly high emigration
Olga Gagauz - Tatiana Tabac - Irina Pahomii
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