Demographic processes: births, deaths, age composition

A country's population is the result of a seemingly simple addition involving three components. Births increase the population, while deaths decrease it; migration is ultimately determined by whether the number of immigrants or emigrants is higher. Although population size is a unified concept, the magnitude of the three components mentioned above is shaped by very different mechanisms, which are only loosely connected in modern societies. Thus, when we talk about demographic processes, we must interpret and understand the development of the three components separately, and then connect their final results. Our summary deals with the development, characterization, and understanding of the first two factors, while the issue of migration is discussed in a separate study (Blaskó–Ligeti–Sik 2014) in this volume. In the last part of our study—age structure, aging—we will also consider the consequences of migration processes. This approach has a long tradition, as the concept of natural reproduction encompasses the balance between births and deaths, but we all know, and especially in modern societies we cannot ignore, that migration plays an increasingly important role in the development of the current population size and thus in the age structure. The population of Hungary was 10,588,614 on January 1, 1989, and 9,877,365 on January 1, 2014, 25 years later.