On July 1st, Portugal took over the EU’s rotating presidency from Germany. Angela Merkel’s six months at the helm will be a tough act to follow. Merkel had continued her winning streak by making EU leaders sign up to joint energy targets in March, by persuading George Bush – at least in principle – to use the UN to negotiate a post-Kyoto climate regime, and by getting her 26 EU colleagues to agree the outlines of a treaty to replace the failed EU constitution.

The EU must face up to recent projections showing that aging will have a major economic and budgetary impact.

Interdisciplinary studies that draw on long-term, global population projections often make limited use of projection results, due at least in part to the historically opaque nature of the projection process. We present a guide to such projections aimed at researchers and educators who would benefit from putting them to greater use. Drawing on new practices and new thinking on uncertainty, methodology, and the likely future courses of fertility and life expectancy, we discuss who makes projections and how, and the key assumptions upon which they are based. We also compare methodology and recent results from prominent institutions and provide a guide to other sources of demographic information, pointers to projection results, and an entry point to key literature in the field.

This paper addresses in a systematic demographic manner the widely discussed question: To what extent can immigration compensate for low fertility in Europe? We begin with a set of 28 alternative scenarios combining seven different fertility levels with four different migration assumptions at the level of the EU-15 to 2050. Next, we address the research question in the context of probabilistic population projections, and the new concept of conditional uncertainty distributions in population forecasting is introduced. Statistically this is done by sorting one thousand simulations into low, medium, and high groups for fertility and migration according to the average levels of paths over the simulation period. The results show a similar picture to that of the probability-free scenarios, but also indicate that for the old-age dependency ratio, the uncertainty about future mortality trends greatly adds to the ranges of the conditional uncertainty distributions.

United Nations projections indicate that over the next 50 years, the populations of virtually all countries of Europe as well as Japan will face population decline and population ageing. The new challenges of declining and ageing populations will require comprehensive reassessments of many established policies and programmes, including those relating to international migration. Focusing on these two striking and critical population trends, the report considers replacement migration for eight low-fertility countries (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, United Kingdom and United States) and two regions (Europe and the European Union). Replacement migration refers to the international migration that a country would need to offset population decline and population ageing resulting from low fertility and mortality rates.

The projections presented here were published by INSEE between 2001 and 2003. They concern metropolitan France up to 2050. Three fertility scenarios, three mortality scenarios and two migration scenarios provide a total of 18 scenarios, along with two additional, less realistic scenarios - constant mortality and zero migration - which serve as a reference.

This paper presents the methodology and results of labour force projections over the long term (until 2050) for each of the 25 EU Member States. These projections were undertaken in order to provide the background technical inputs for the assessment of the potential economic and fiscal impact of an ageing population. This assessment is carried out in the framework of the EU Economic Policy Committee’s Ageing Working Group by projecting public expenditure on pensions, health care, long-term care, unemployment insurance and education.

The characteristics described herein recognise the basic need for an EDTIB which dependably supplies European Armed Forces’ needs even in times of conflict, and which provides for appropriate national sovereignty and EU autonomy. They also take into account the fundamental need for demand side harmonisation across the EDA Member States in order to facilitate the consolidation and restructuring of the supply side.

The EU population is likely to decline, but it is certain to age.

Of all the prerogatives of states, security and defence policy is probably the one which least lends itself to a collective European approach; however, after the single currency, it is in this dimension that the Union has made the most rapid and spectacular progress over the last five years.