The Greek government has initiated a reward system that will see the parents of newborn babies being given a €2000 baby bonus in an attempt to reverse the country’s demographic decline.
Fine Gael’s election campaign seems to have been derailed in part by the understandable anger felt by voters at the mess the government has made of the pensions issue. The issue has arisen because private sector workers retire at 65 but since 2014 they have not been entitled to access the State pension until 66 […]
Time is ticking for Europe, as it begins to take its demographic challenge seriously. The European Commission recently appointed Dubravka Šuica from Croatia to the position of Vice-President for Democracy and Demography. Her mission letter outlines her job for the next five years: “ensuring that Europe understands and responds to one of its deepest lying […]
The European Commission (the executive branch of the EU) for the next five years has recently taken office under the Presidency of Ursula von der Leyen. The 27 members of the Commission (one from each member state – the departing UK has not named a commissioner) form a cabinet government and together they propose legislation, […]
Thanks to a much less rigid regime compared to China’s, Vietnam never managed to completely destroy its demographic future, despite falling for the population control trap.
Speaking during a discussion as part of the Jonathan Swift Festival at St. Patrick’s Cathedral last Saturday, former President Mary McAleese told the Irish people that they had no right to be questioning the rapidly changing demographics of our society. Celebrating this, McAleese declared that “today, 17 per cent of our population comes from somewhere […]
As we discussed last week, the challenge of a declining Russia is one of the stories of the 21st geopolitical century. But directly to Russia’s west is another area of the world that is suffering demographic decline: East and Central Europe. Many of these countries’ demographic woes we have discussed before, but we have not really […]
No one quite knows what is going on in North Korea (although Michael Palin does have a book out which may be illuminating…but probably won’t be). Thus, when it comes to its population and predicted trends, it is hard to be sure just what the real story in in the Hermit Kingdom. But, from what can […]
These figures show that continued population growth in the UK (as a whole and in Wales and England alone) is heavily dependent on immigration. When, and if, Brexit finally happens then the numbers of immigrants and their countries of origin may change substantially.
One of the interesting and worrying trends in the USA at the moment is its political polarisation. This is of course not unique to that country, but there is some evidence that the political divide is becoming increasingly reflected in an economic and geographic one. That is, people are becoming less likely to be living […]
William Huang describes how politicians in India are backing a bill which orders civil servants to stop at two children.
Portugal has had an exceptional experience with emigration and immigration for several hundred years. As skilled mariners they set sail to open up world markets over 500 years ago. Portuguese settled in all continents from Brazil in the Americas all the way to East Timor in Asia including large parts of Africa in between. In […]