Population ageing in emerging Europe: Consequences and policy challenges
According to the 2018 Ageing Report, the EU will ‘turn increasingly grey’ in the coming decades. The latest projections reveal dramatic changes in the population structure up to 2070 in the EU and the central and eastern European countries (CEE-EU). For the EU, the size of the population is expected to be broadly unchanged, while for the CEE-EU it would fall considerably. For both, the population will be much older in the future, stemming from low birth rates, rising life expectancy and continuing, but declining inflow of migrants over the long-term. The impact of population ageing is however much more pronounced in CEE-EU, with the old-age dependency ratio increasing much more than for the EU as a whole (CEE-EU reaching 66 per cent in 2070, compared with 52 per cent for the EU), (see Graph 1). There are, however, significant differences across countries.
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