Abstract
Since young adults tend to move from rural to urban regions, whereas older adults move from urban to rural regions, we may expect to see increasing differences in population ageing across urban and rural regions. This paper examines whether trends in population ageing across urban and rural NUTS-2 regions of the EU-27 have diverged over the period 2003–13. We use the methodological approach of convergence analysis, quite recently brought to demography from the field of economic research. Unlike classical beta and sigma approaches to convergence, we focus not on any single summary statistic of convergence, but rather analyse the whole cumulative distribution of regions. Such an approach helps to identify which specific group of regions is responsible for the major changes. Our results suggest that, despite expectations, there was no divergence in age structures between urban and rural regions; rather, divergence happened within each of the groups of regions.
Highlights
Human populations experience the demographic transition at varying times and speeds (Lee 2003; Reher 2004)
This paper examines differences in population ageing across NUTS-2 regions, which are the result of an attempt to unify geographical levels and facilitate cross-country comparisons (Eurostat 2015a)
Once we have established the concept of urbanization at NUTS-2 level, we explore whether urban– rural differences are contributing towards convergence or divergence in population ageing
Summary
Human populations experience the demographic transition at varying times and speeds (Lee 2003; Reher 2004). Even though all European countries are experiencing population ageing, there are relative differences in the speed of the process across countries and regions (De Beer et al 2012; Rees et al 2012; Kashnitsky et al 2017). The key distinction in the relative speed of population ageing at subnational level is between urban and rural areas, which is in turn largely driven by migration, mostly internal (De Beer et al 2012). Ageing and urbanization are seen as the two main demographic transitions of developed populations (Beard and Petitot 2010)
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