Demographic trends: fertility, mortality, ageing

The population development of a country depends on three components: births increase the population size; deaths decrease it; and migration can increase it or de-crease it, depending on whether there are more immigrants or emigrants. These three components are shaped by very different mechanisms, which in modern societies are only loosely related. Thus, when we discuss population trends, we need to examine and understand the development of each component separately, before linking them together to arrive at a single figure for the population. This overview analyses the development of the first two components – births and deaths; migration is discussed in a separate study (Blaskó, Ligeti and Sik 2014).1 However, the implications of migration will be highlighted briefly in the section on ‘age distribution and ageing’, towards the end of this chapter. This is a classical approach, since the definition of natural population change refers to the balance of births and deaths; however, the increasing contribution of migration to the size and age composition of the population, especially in modern societies, is also widely acknowledged and cannot be ignored. The population of Hungary was 10,588,614 on 1 January 1989; three decades later, on 1 January 2018, it was 9,778,371 – a difference of over 800,000. If we consider the number of births and deaths between the start of 1989 and the end of 2017, it becomes obvious that the underlying changes were even more fundamental. In 2017, there were more than 30,000 fewer births and about 13,000 fewer deaths than in 1989. In the whole period under consideration, close to a million more people died than were born; the only reason why the population did not decline accordingly was that net migration until 2010 was clearly positive (more immigration than emigration). However, net migration changed recently, and therefore today migration also contributes to population decline (Cf. Gödri, 2015; Hárs in this volume).