European countries are dying out! Even taking into account immigration rates, populations are shrinking and ageing — by 2015 the number of deaths in Europe will have outstripped the number of births. Every country in Europe now has a general fertility rate below 2.1 births per woman, which is the minimum level required to keep the population stable in number. The average across Europe is 1.51. However, because the death rate has also fallen, populations will continue to grow until about 2030, when it is predicted that they will start to decline dramatically. Countries in Europe now have a population pyramid such as that of the UK shown in Figure 1(a). Compare this with the population pyramid for India in Figure 1(b), where the population is rising rapidly.
Another outcome of the decline in both birth and death rates is that each country will have an increasingly high proportion of elderly people. This has been called the ‘greying of the population’, which means that, in the future, a greater proportion of people over the age of 65 will need to be supported by fewer people in the working age range of 15–65. Looking again at Figure 1, this European imbalance is clear, compared to the situation in India. The UK graph shows a high ‘dependency ratio’ — the difference in the percentage of people above the age of 65 and those aged between 15 and 65.
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