Resilience and demographic stress in twenty-first century Catalonia

Abstract

If resilience is defined as the ability of an individual or a complex system to return to a previous state of balance or find a new one after a critical situation, twenty-first-century Catalan demography can certainly be characterised as a resilient system. In the new millennium, the population of Catalonia has jumped from 6.2 to 7.5 million, mainly due to a migration boom that saw the arrival of 1.7 million people between 2000 and 2014. As a result of this inflow of migrants, 17% of the registered population in 2015 was foreign-born. From 2008, as a consequence of the bursting of a real estate and financial bubble and the structural adjustment programme that followed, international flows fell by half. At the same time, emigration increased, with nearly 800,000 people leaving the region, only 14% of whom were nativeborn. In spite of everything, population losses have been minimal. Family formation and fertility have been affected by recent immigration and the economic downturn, but they also reflect a failure to fully implement effective genderequality measures, which has led to a decrease in the number of unions and births, as well as accelerating a process of deinstitutionalization launched several decades ago. At the same time, life expectancy at birth has continued to rise, increasing by three years since 2000, and there has been a narrowing of the gap between the sexes, which have become more equal in their good and ill fortune