Regional Population Meeting
9 November 1998
Budapest (Hungary), 7-9 December 1998
David Coleman
University of Oxford
Department of Applied Social Studies and Social
Research
Oxford, United Kingdom
Unedited version prepared by David Coleman for the Regional
Population Meeting (Budapest, 7-9 December 1998). The views
expressed in the paper are those of the author and do not imply
the expression of any opinion on the part of the Government of
Hungary, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, or
the United Nations Population Fund.
NOTE
Any data provided under the heading "Yugoslavia"
relate to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia which, in accordance
with the General Assembly Resolutions 47/1 and 47/229, cannot
continue automatically the membership of the former Socialist
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
David Coleman has been the Reader in
Demography at Oxford University since 1996 and was the Lecturer
in Demography at Oxford University since 1980. Between 1985 and
1987 he worked for the British government, as the Special Adviser
to the Home Secretary, and then to the Ministers of Housing and
of the Environment.
Research interests include the
comparative demographic trends in the industrial world;
immigration trends and policies and the demography of ethnic
minorities; and housing policy. He has worked as a consultant for
the Home Office, for the United Nations and for private business.
He has published over 60 papers and
seven books including The State of Population Theory: Forward
from Malthus (ed.with R.S. Schofield, 1986), The British
Population: patterns, trends and processes (with J. Salt, 1992.
Oxford University Press); International Migration: Regional
Responses and Processes (ed. with M. Macura 1994); Europe's
Population in the 1990s (ed. 1996, Oxford University Press) and
Ethnicity in the 1991 Census. Volume 1: Demographic
characteristics of ethnic minority populations. edited (with J.
Salt), London, HMSO.
He has been the joint editor of the
European Journal of Population (Paris) since 1992 and in 1997 was
elected to the Council of the International Union for the
Scientific Study of Population.
Executive summary
The aim of this paper is to give a brief statistical overview
of the populations of the UN/ECE region and to discuss some of
the many intellectually and practically important issues which
they present today. The specialist papers by Calot, Józan, Salt
and Schmid will address specific areas in much more detail and
rigour.
The countries of the UN/ECE are a varied and heterogeneous
group. Data quality varies considerably between them. However the
position has improved greatly in the last few years.
International compilations from the Council of Europe and from
Eurostat give scholars and policy makers a much wider range of
detailed data than was ever possible before. Though its
concentration upon Central and Eastern European demographic
material, and its invaluable Family and Fertility Surveys, the
Population Activities Unit of the UN/ECE has made possible whole
new areas of comparative study.
Fewer babies and longer lives are the hallmark of most
countries of the UN/ECE area. Population ageing has followed in
all of them, with the end of population growth in parts of
Southern and Eastern Europe and not far behind elsewhere. Some
Southern European populations, formerly with relatively youthful
age-structures, are undergoing exceptionally rapid ageing,
acquiring heavier age-dependency burdens than established older
populations in Northern Europe. The West and Central Asian member
states of the UN/ECE area have travelled less far down the road
of low fertility and population ageing. Population growth in the
UN/ECE will be concentrated there in the future, and in North
America where relatively high fertility and immigration ensure
continued population growth. The UN/ECE region as a whole is set
to become demographically marginalized. Its share of world
population, now a seventh, can only decline in the future. Almost
all the additional 3 billion people forecast to be added to the
world's population by 2025 will live in the Third World. More
than half the population growth in Europe, and a smaller part in
North America, is due to immigration. Nonetheless, the paths
being made by some UN/ECE countries into previously unknown
demographic territory are those which the rest of the world is
likely to follow.
With one or two exceptions, all the countries of the UN/ECE
area have birth rates below the level needed to replace the
population. Current population growth, whether desired or not, is
running on borrowed time or on immigration. There are persistent
differences between major parts of the UN/ECE. Western Europe
centered on Germany has had low but stable fertility for two
decades, Northern Europe and North America maintain a higher
average. Southern Europe has the lowest birth rates in the world,
closely followed by some of the countries in Eastern Europe as
well as in those former Soviet republics bordering these
countries, where the problems of transition have provoked a
flight from fertility.
Substantial differences in the pattern as well as the volume
of childbearing persist across the UN/ECE region. Eastern Europe
preserved its ancient pattern of early childbearing and low
levels of childlessness, following early and universal marriage;
a pattern if anything accentuated by communism and only now
bending under the pressure of recent economic difficulties. Since
the 1960s about a third or more of births have occurred outside
marriage in North America and Northern Europe. Accordingly large
numbers of children in those areas are growing up in households
headed by lone parents, in which the UK takes the lead. Southern
Europe had been more resistant to these trends, while on the
whole traditional patterns are still observed in western and
central Asia. These novelties of the latter half of the 20th century are sometimes called the ‘second demographic
transition’. They are often regarded as a further sequel of
continued economic growth and of welfare systems in educated and
partly secularised societies, making possible the emancipation of
women from economic dependence on men in an environment where
traditional family ideology is eroded.
One of the greatest legacies of 50 years of communism has been
a widening chasm in health conditions and survival between the
Western and Eastern parts of the UN/ECE area. In North America
and in western Europe the post-war reduction in mortality was
temporarily stalled in the 1960s partly thanks to the smoking
epidemic. For the last two decades further falls in mortality
have resumed. As a result infant mortality is approaching a
possibly incompressible level. Expectation of life of over 80
years for women, and around 75 for men, are becoming normal,
adding to the demographic ageing process. The trend in Eastern
Europe has been quite the reverse; a worsening of mortality or at
least a failure to improve especially among adult men for nearly
40 years, such that their expectation of life is in some
countries 15 years less than that of their fellow Europeans.
International migration from outside Europe, in decline by the
mid-1980s and moderate in North America until around 1980, rose
rapidly to peak about 1992. Renewed inflows, especially of asylum
claimants and illegal immigrants, took gross immigration flows
into Europe to record levels (over two million per year, about
one million net) and pushed immigration control and the
assimilation of foreign populations to the top of political
agendas. Migration to North America is of a similar order of
magnitude but, at least in its regular form, is managed as a
long-standing dimension of government policy. The substantial
rise in immigration to western Europe cannot be readily accounted
for by conventional models, although the reduction at least in
counted migration since the early 1990s in Europe has been
attributed to the more effective measures and conditions imposed
on migration flows and asylum claiming, prompting suggestions
that we now may be entering a period of lower but more
clandestine movement.
The expected mass-migration of newly liberated Eastern
European and former Soviet citizens has not materialised,
although migration rates initially increased especially through
short-term work schemes between Poland and Germany. Ethnic
migration continues to dominate movement within the Eastern part
of the area following the opening of frontiers and the break up
of old collectivities, especially return migration to Russia,
although labour migration is not unimportant. Eastern Europe has
become the destination of considerable, mostly irregular,
migration flows from outside the area, including transit migrants
from the South. Many of these, balked at entry to the West, may
become permanent residents. A later section considers the
arguments that immigration on the recent scale, even if claimed
to be problematic in Europe in economic terms or in regard to
social coherence, may nonetheless be needed to rectify
deficiencies in workforce and population age-structure. It
concludes that solutions to these problems, to the limited extent
that they can be ‘solved’ at all, lie elsewhere.
New patterns of family formation and living arrangement have
important consequences; increasing the number of households and
reducing their average size; increasing the number of one-parent
families and 'reconstituted' families, and thereby causing up to
a quarter of children to be brought up in non-standard families.
These trends increase welfare burdens and housing demand, and may
affect personal and psychological development. The causes as well
as the consequences of these radical changes are disputed.
Changes in ideas and values, in economic trends and in welfare
and legal developments are variously put forward. The
relationships between fertility and other key aspects of social
behaviour may themselves be changing. For example since the
1980s, in Norway and some other countries, women at work are just
as likely as are housewives to have a third child.
In different parts of the UN/ECE region, difficulties are
perceived in various aspects of childbearing. In the US and the
UK high levels of teenage fertility, often unplanned or
perversely motivated have attracted attention. Somewhat different
problems afflict Eastern Europe where the communist legacy of
poor knowledge and practice of conventional family planning and a
harmful reliance on abortion as a front-line method of birth
control persists. In 1990 less than 30 per cent of women in the
Soviet Union used contraception, resorting instead to several
abortions per lifetime. That position is now improving but there
are still major weaknesses in the family planning facilities
available to or known to the women of the area.
Most countries in the ‘western’ part of the area are
also facing reproductive health problems. But here the most
salient issue is the increasing risk of involuntary sterility
following the later commencement of childbearing, so that delayed
births turn into cancelled ones. Medical intervention can only
alleviate this problem to a modest extent; it is likely to
present an obstacle to further delay in the average age at first
birth. The rising proportion of voluntarily childless women in
some countries also leads to the question: why should educated
women want any children in the first place? Material returns are
derisory and psychological ones surprisingly negative when
measured. This problem may be one whose solution goes beyond
conventional demography, it may lie instead in the realm of
biology, genetics or psychology.
Is the ‘second demographic transition’ convergent in
the UN/ECE so that it will become as universal in the developed
world as the first demographic transition, or will it remain in
its present partial, half-complete state? In many countries in
the region, sexual and reproductive behaviour such as divorce,
cohabitation, abortion and illegitimacy which was formely
uncommon and regarded as immoral has now become accepted,
commonplace and almost unremarked. However, in no country have
these patterns become the lifetime experience of a large majority
of people. In some they have made little impact. Will this trend
stall at its present state, adding to the diversity within and
between populations, or will it to encompass eventually all the
populations in the area ? Not all cultural revolutions succeed.
The Reformation, seen as quite progressive at the time, stopped
at more or less its present boundaries in the 17th century, boundaries perhaps not co-incidentally similar to those
which now interest us.
Finally, is a population with a birth rate equivalent to about
one child per woman actually sustainable? Can it be rescued by
any encouragements to the birth rate through subsidy, or has the
burden of the elderly on the family and on state revenues by then
grown too great, plunging the population concerned into a kind of
demographic ‘black hole’? The ‘post-material’
demographic manifestations of postmodernism depend in part upon
welfare transfers; divorce creates demand for social housing,
lone parents may find it difficult to work. Does that put a limit
on the spread of some of these behaviours, insofar as they may
need support from welfare? No-one has estimated the cost of the
second demographic transition, but some of its manifestations
have already provoked governments to moderate its expense,
implicitly if not explicitly.