Introduction

The population of Europe is ageing. By the early decades of the next century this process is likely to lead to a decline in the population of the 12 countries of the European Community, with the number of EC citizens being 2 per cent less in 2025 than it is today. This fundamental demographic restructuring is a consequence of the generally low and declining fertility rates over the last twenty years which have produced small cohorts of children and young adults while the large post-war ‘baby-boom’ cohort has moved into middle age. There has, of course, been considerable variation among EC countries in the scale and timing of this demographic change because of their different population structures and histories, and yet wider variation among Eastern European countries, several of which still have fertility rates above the replacement level. Figures 1.1 (a) and (b) show that whereas in Western Europe the economically active population will reach a peak in several countries between 1990 and 2000, in Southern and Eastern Europe, as in Ireland and the US, the economically active population will continue to expand, though at a declining rate, into the third decade of the 21st century. Nevertheless, the demographic trend is common to all countries – Europe, the ‘Old World’, is becoming older.

Knowledge about this ageing of the European population is no more recent than the process itself, which began in the early years of the twentieth century as a consequence of a general fall in fertility rates from the very high levels of the nineteenth century.