Migration and working age population decline in Europe

It is more than simply a truism to say that populations are ageing over time. Structural ageing (changes in the age distribution of the population, whereby older people constitute a larger proportion of the total population) is a real phenomenon, observed across all countries and regions of the world. However, the areas worst affected by structural ageing tend to be remote regions, where young people are out-migrating to cities in large numbers.

One way that structural ageing can manifest is in the size of the working age population (this can be defined in various ways, but a common approach is the population aged 15-64 years). As the population ages, a larger proportion of the population is aged 65 years or over (and no longer in the working age population), and so the working age population shrinks. Similarly, as young people migrate out of a country or region, the working age population shrinks.

So, I was interested in this recent article by Daniela Ghio, Anne Goujon, and Fabrizio Natale (all European Commission Joint Research Centre), published in the journal Demographic Research (open access, with a shorter non-technical summary available on N-IUSSP). They look at to what extent cohort turnover and migration effects affect the size of the working age population for regions across the European Union countries (specifically, for NUTS3 regions - the smallest disaggregation of regions used by Eurostat) over the period from 2015 to 2019. Cohort turnover is specified as the difference between the size of the cohort of young people at labour market entry age (15-19 years) and the size of the cohort of older people at labour market exit age (60-64 years). Migration is the net migration of the working age population. Comparing those two values with change in the working age population over the period, Ghio et al. categorise four different types of regions. The first type of region was:

NUTS3 territorial units where both components are positive represented approximately 8% of territories (13% of EU working-age population in 2019), mainly distributed across the following countries: the Netherlands (20 territories), Belgium (15), Spain (12), and Germany (11).

In the vast majority of territories (94), the positive effects coincided with an increase in the size of the working-age population during the 2015–2019 period...

Next:

The cluster with positive cohort turnover effects and negative net migration was the smallest one: only 5% of EU territories accounting for 11% of the EU working-age population in 2019, mostly located in France (30). Among these, the majority (54 territories, corresponding to 8% of the EU working-age population) reported a decrease in the size of the working-age population.

Third up: 

The cluster with negative cohort turnover effects and positive net migration included the largest share (63%) and number (738) of EU territories, representing 54% of the EU working-age population in 2019.

Finally:

The cluster with both negative cohort turnover effects and net migration was the second largest and consisted of 266 territories, corresponding to 23% of EU territories and 22% of the EU working-age population in 2019, mostly distributed across eastern EU MS such as Bulgaria (18), Romania (31), and Hungary (9); central eastern EU MS such as Poland (40); south-eastern EU MS such as Croatia (18); and southern EU MS such as Greece (18) and Italy (41).

The four types of region are nicely illustrated in Figure 2 from the paper:

The overall decline in the size of the working age population is readily apparent in the first panel of the figure, on the left. Notice that much of that change is due to population ageing (the cohort turnover in the third panel, on the right) rather than net migration (the middle panel). I suspect this would be a general feature not just for Europe, but for all western countries, including New Zealand and Australia.

This is a nice paper, which offers an interesting characterisation of regions across two dimensions: (1) whether cohort change is increasing or decreasing the size of the working age population; and (2) whether net migration is increasing or decreasing the size of the working age population. I have done similar analyses in the past (unpublished as yet), but also looking dynamically as to how the changes in components (in my case, it was natural increase or decrease [births minus deaths] and net migration) move over time. This is the sort of analysis that local planners and policy makers are really interested in. Importantly, it doesn't require much in the way of data or heavy analytical skills. It would be really interesting to see a similar analysis for New Zealand - a good potential project for a future Honours or Masters student.

[HT: N-IUSSP]