Countries with Declining Population 2022 | Hacker News Reader

Countries with Declining Population 2022

worldpopulationreview.com

Source for this article is United Nations 2019, which already makes it woefully out date due to COVID excess deaths and the invasion of Ukraine.

For anyone interested, here is the 2022 report: https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...

Looks like the decline in eastern europe is largely due to economic reasons and people migrate torwards the west? The economic decline in eastern europe after the end of the cold war and the neoliberal privatisation as well as corruption and mismanaged in each economy is something that's not often discussed. Beeing in eastern europe feels sometimes like being in a western colony because most corporations / supermarkets / products are just western products. Also more often than not it's not the place for innovation but rather cheap labor workbenches for western corporations. Not sure if that was a given in the 90ies or wether it was the result of the politics at this time. If anyone can recommend some literature I'd be interested. For the former GDR (also big population loss due to economic reasons) one could argue that at least some industries were killed to avoid competition from western corporations but of course it's difficult to reliable connect cause and effect. Is in the EU eastern nations also this oligarch problem that ukraine/russia inflicted on themselves?

While your stereotypes certainly match for some Eastern European countries, they are quite mismatched for some others. I was very surprised about the Baltic countries being high up in the list. They generally have high education, low corruption and are driving innovation. Estonia for example is the country with the best digitalisation in Europe and likely amongst the highest in the world.

I recently was talking to a company with a team in Serbia. I honestly didn't know what to expect, good or bad, as I didn't know much about the country. I was blown away - they were very astute, using the latest tech, and spoke English probably better than I do as an American. Definitely opened my eyes - as Americans, we generally don't hear much about the country.

They don't take local factors into account at all. The local Russian speakers have emigrated at a larger rate than say ethnic Latvians. So, if they just project past trends to the future they are bound to be wrong.

Also, immigration is getting noticeably stronger. And then, the elephant in the room. They don't seem to align these projections with the climate change projections. The Baltics are going to continue to have a hospitable climate with no water availability issues. Unlike most of Southern Europe, and many other places in the world.

So, I'd be willing to put my money against these projections turning out correct.

I don’t know about Estonia, but Lithuania (number 2) has prices like in Switzerland with salaries being small fraction of Swiss ones. Plus political instability. Just watch the Taiwan embassy opening and Chinese retaliation. Or railroad to Kaliningrad blockade. Plus steadily declining level of education and health care.

Haters gonna hate

Check this out: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267945/lithuania-pisa-r... While reading is improving, math and science skills are declining. Capable Soviet era teachers about to disappear and independent Lithuania’s education kicks in. Ouch.

That's a very strong cluster of population loss in Eastern Europe and the Baltics.

It's probably for multiple reasons, but ability to travel in the EU westward toward greater opportunity seems like a big one.

Latvia and Lithuania surprise me though I thought these were more similar to western and northern Europe economically. Perhaps their proximity to the border of Russia influences things.

Latvia has a large Russian population that was mostly not given citizenship[1]. What you see in the demographics is that the ethnic Latvian population is in slow decline, and it's _mostly_ this ethnically Russian population that causes the steep decline, down 50% since 1990.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-citizens_(Latvia) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Latvia#/media/...

When they joined the EU there was a lot of closures of existing heavy industry in those countries - some say they were paid by EU members to avoid potential competition. No reason they would look like north europe economically.

In the 10s they worsened their stance with their larger neighbours Russia and Belarus which diminished their value as transit countries. And now Lithuania is also quarreling with China[0].

At the same time, Finland kept it prominence as a transit country to Russia and continues to do so even today[1].

0. http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/mdenner/Demo/texts/elephant...

1. https://www.dp.ru/a/2022/07/19/Peterburzhci_raskupili_bil

> but ability to travel in the EU westward toward greater opportunity seems like a big one.

Main reason why Germany wanted to extend EU to East countries. They benefited from it more than anyone else.

And here I am trying to immigrate to Romania.

Ukraine is up there though despite not being in the EU. I wonder where people were heading (pre invasion)

From what I know many migrated to Poland after 2014 maidan. Simple google query yields many articles about numbers, I won't link here since I don't know about credible source I would feel comfortable to share. But from my observations during past few years I must say there must have been many, I'd risk to say buildings industry was able to grow because of inflow of Ukrainian workers. This helped post-February since many families already had somebody here so they could join. And also Polish bad historical encounters with Russians led to Polish society rising to help as many Ukrainians as possible, many school gyms and other public places were converted to host Ukrainian refugees, similar with some companies who donated their office spaces. There was a time all LinkedIn updates on my board were from such companies and from individual people who were organizing to help.

Poland, Italy, Russia, Germany, Czechia.

> Portugal has made attempts to lure back those who emigrated, whether or not they are highly paid or highly skilled.

Yeah, so far those attempts are a joke from professional point of view.

They tend to try to talk to our hearts, handwaving what we would lose in salaries and work conditions from current European locations outside Portugal.

Sentimental and family reasons tend to speak much higher than those offers have done so far.

I can't speak to your experience as a Portuguese person, but Porto really made a mark on me to the point where my half-Portuguese (of Azores descent) and I are considering to make Porto our second home outside of Toronto. Portugal in general feels ready for a wave of tech folk and I'm sure they could recruit back some of the talent that left, made inroads in North American tech, and are able to work remotely back in Portugal.

It's cheap, has excellent architecture, above average food, and absolutely charming people and nature.

I also think Portugal has a great potential on this front.

The climate is relatively good, population is well educated, low crime rates, close to lots of interesting places for tourism. And tax incentives are awesome for remote workers.

I think the only reason I've not moved there is family back home.

If you're considering maintaining homes on two continents, I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess the local job market in at least one of those two places doesn't affect you at all.

Yeah, well, we got married fairly recently, so we're actually saving a decent amount of money compared to before we met. Plus we both like pretty small places. Enough room for the cat and for love.

If you’re at the point that you can seriously consider maintaining two homes, across an entire ocean, you are probably far above the sort of financial decisions the average person faces.

Definitely not cheap for regular Portuguese salaries.

Do not take this personally, but people coming from rich countries and driving housing costs to skyrocket aren't getting much love.

Definitely, but the golden-visa-inflated-price is different from a working person that buys a reasonably priced house, no ?

I mean, regular people are also gonna pay taxes since they actually plan to live, instead of just buying an overpriced place for the visa...

The house price doesn't change depending on the buyer, and reasonable priced houses are getting hard to come by.

How much is a reasonably priced home going for in Portugal now? What are the good areas to buy in? What urban area would be good? What area in the countryside would be good?

Probably depends if you're a Portuguese homeowner or not?

I moved to Cascais from UK 5 years ago because of Brexit. Lisbon area is attracting a huge number of extremely wealthy and successful entrepreneurs and professionals - from US, UK, Scandinavia, Netherlands and Brazil. Tax policy, easy to get work visas, Fantastic Infrastructure and Climate make Portugal an attractive country to move to. I don’t believe these forecasts of decline.

I am also interested in getting a pulse on the tech scene in Lisbon, to move there as an IC more so than an entrepreneur.

How do you stay up to date on what's happening tech wise in Lisbon? Just contacts in your personal network or are there specific social media, blogs, podcasts, that you can recommend to get a feel for what's happening?

Are salaries for IC's still suffering from a 'near-shore' effect or are salaries just a flat remote rate and there isn't much of a 'local market' arbitrage effect?

I have found it very easy to meet expats here. Having kids in international schools helps and so does having a dog. Amazing how many friends we have from working the dog at Guincho and Carcavelos beaches, also informal events like Cascais Curry Club. Salaries vary dramatically some low local rates but many Freelancers working remotely at same rate as US or UK. Lots of IT meetups in Lisbon. Tax is quite favourable for Freelancers 25% deduction combined with NHR regime 20% tax, ie effectively 15%, but you do have to pay social costs. Public healthcare is good for emergencies which you top up with private healthcare which is excellent and remarkably cheap.

Really appreciate it, I will message you on Linkedin, with a short follow-up question.

Meanwhile many people are getting between 1000 and 1500 euro salaries with an university degree, and living with parents until they manage to marry and get 20 - 40 year credit to pay for the apartment.

Just seeing the amount of IT workers from Brazil (me included) fleeing to Portugal...

It can't compete with the north in wages (especially the kinda-north countries which also have special tax regimes for immigrants), but it's much safer than the other CPLP countries, guess that's the strategy behind the new foreign law ?

I think that, for better or worse, we'll be an important factor in the portuguese demographical and budgetary future

I wonder did there’s an opportunity here. Like…. Hey, I’ll move to one of these countries and start a business doing _________ because in a shrinking population that’d be great!

Something where you can exploit cheap elderly labor. Their government pensions, supported by the shrinking working population, won’t be enough to retire

I thought about it the other way: build an accelerator to get paid by nation states to pull young, productive workers to your declining population country (both remote workers and skilled on site workers, think healthcare). Want to start something together (I’m a highly skilled worker familiar with and working on expatriating to Western Europe)? Lots of value to generate in nation states competing for future productivity, and therefore power.

Both are interesting business models.

How would you go about this?

Not really, you just have a smaller consumer group. Not that great for business. In almost all cases educated people are leaving those places for economic reasons.

I like the idea here but what are you going to do?

Local consumers and employees are going down.

Many of these places people professionals are / want to emigrate OUT.

I kinda like the idea of living / working in a sleepy Italian village but then you have the issues of services (government AND private) degrading and so on...

You can already do that in the US too, some rural parts of the country have a significant lack of skilled tradespeople.

Land may become cheaper given fewer people – so, farms?

bulldozing houses and buying land for cheap maybe?

But then what? Farm on it?

Cost of bulldozing and making land farm-able I imagine is crazy high... let alone all you'll get is a patchwork of houses / land.

This is a lagging indicator.

A more leading indicator is "Countries who have reached peak births".

The world itself has reached, or is approaching, "peak baby" - though this will be a long plateau.

That wouldn't capture the main driver of population decline for most these countries.

Seems like the primary cause in most cases is /not/ the fact that deaths are outpacing births but, instead, that emigration is outpacing immigration.

Most of these countries are low-income nations in the EU whose workforce is now leaving to flock to higher-income countries.

We're basically seeing a brain drain in EU countries that need that workforce most to drive future growth. One of the unintended consequences of EU membership.

> are low-income nations in the EU whose workforce

This is true, but it is localized and a one-time shock.

Portugal, Italy, Greece have had sub replacement fertility for 40 years already.

China, Japan, South Korea - urbanized, industrialized, economically growing countries.

The generally accepted causes are urbanization, reduced religion, education of women, which to re-enforce each other.

> Countries who have reached peak births:

"When will the world reach ‘peak child’?" [0]

Also top 10 countries with lowest birth rate [1]:

- Monaco - 6.63.

- South Korea - 6.89.

- Andorra - 6.91.

- Japan - 7.00.

- Taiwan (limited recognition) - 7.43.

- Greece - 7.72.

- Puerto Rico - 7.90.

- Portugal - 8.02.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/peak-child

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/birth-rat...

Perhaps of more significance, the top 10 countries with populations over 10 million with the lowest birth rates (same sources):

- South Korea - 51.78 million - 6.89.

- Japan - 125.8 million - 7.00.

- Taiwan - 23.57 million - 7.43.

- Greece - 10.72 million - 7.72.

- Portugal - 10.31 million - 8.02.

- Italy - 59,037,474 - 8.5

- Germany - 83,369,843 - 8.6

- Romania - 19,659,267 - 8.7

- Spain - 47,558,630 - 9

- Czech Republic - 10,493,986 - 9.2

Interesting that you put an asterisk on Taiwan, which believes it is its own country, but not Puerto Rico, which has never been its own country.

I agree - that information is all copied with fidelity from the cited sources. Not my own.

Not sure why this is downvoted.

It's 100% true that the child and working-age population shrinks long before the absolute population starts to dip, and in many ways that's more meaningful.

In fact, shrinking population is further deferred by improving health and longevity. This means that many countries which seemingly stable population are in fact growing older and older, leading to an eventual cliff.

Also, title should be changed. This is "Population decline projections for 2050".

I guess the missing piece from this would be trends in immigration rates.

Otherwise countries like Canada would appear to be shrinking, when in fact they're growing overall.

> The world itself has reached, or is approaching, "peak baby" - though this will be a long plateau.

How did you arrive at the strange idea that we are approaching "peak baby"? Barring some cataclysm, the only plausible mechanism to reach "peak baby" is hitting permanent Malthusian limits.

A lagging indicator of what? The measure in question is change in population...

Always find Italy the interesting one. Nice place to live but they stopped having kids. Notice a lot of single middle-aged+ women when visiting too.

I'm Italian, my PhD in Germany in pure maths is paid 40% more than friends working in Italy with engineering degrees. If I stay in Germany after finishing my degree I could easily make twice the money I could get in Italy regardless of whether I stay in academia or go to industry. Not a strong incentive to go back in the immediate future!

Italy has medium salaries combined with high taxes. That's not a good combination. Having children is way too expensive.

When the average net salary is around 1400€s per month and 75% of taxpayers are below that how can you afford children?

Anyway, I think that shrinking population is healthy for the planet.

The problem to solve is financial: how do you sustain so many retirees with a relatively low working-age population?

I think there's plenty of solutions, but none of them is capitalism-friendly.

I find it interesting that the US is expected to grow indefinitely:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states-po...

while almost all of the countries in Central and South American that support the US's growth through immigration will plateau and decline:

e.g. https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/nicaragua-popula...

It seems like a fairly optimistic projection for the US's continued success

I think I'd take that bet. China is on the verge of a big economic struggle with its real estate pyramid scheme games. All of europe is going to struggle with the energy crisis caused by russia. The US is pretty well situated for no particular reason other than other countries are doing poorly.

would be interesting to see the same map but excluding 1st generation immigrants, to infer which countries are only sustaining themselves via immigration.

This is far less neutral of a statistical inquiry than you might believe. What about natives who married foreigners? What about immigrants who are ethnically alike natives? What about second generation immigrants? One reality with data science is that it obscures a highly subjective viewpoint much of the time, leaving a seemingly clear narrative to be interpreted as ‘fact’

That seems pretty straight forward:

>married foreigners

Immigrant.

> ethnically alike

Immigrant.

>second generation

Native.

The question is, "Were you born here?" If yes then not a first generation immigrant. If no, then first generation immigrant.

Peter Zeihan seems to think China is in the worst shape by far, and it's not even close.

Official TFR for 2021 in China was 1.15, and China data is always suspect. They didn’t mitigate economic challenges for common prosperity earlier enough, young people are bailing on family formation (for obvious reasons), and it’s likely that their TFR won’t only fall further into the future but also get “locked in.”

TLDR China is Speedrunning Japan’s demographic and economic transition/decline.

Outdated prediction in case of Poland. Already more people immigrate and Russian invasion of Ukraine vastly Increase that trend.

How does Poland handle a sudden inflow of 10% of their population?

I don’t understand this. India since 2019 has a replacement rate under 2 (1.9). Doesn’t that count as a declining population?

People live for many years, so there's a long lag between when total fertility rate drops below replacement and when total population actually declines.

For example, Japan's total fertility rate remained below replacement since 1974, but its total population has been consistently shrinking only since 2007:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Vital_st...

I'm curious about countries that rebounded from declining population. Are there any in the last century?

Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world and it's not even in the rankings, what?

High life expectancy, low rate of emigration. Also, this is a top 20 list, not a list of all countries that are projected to lose population.

thank god, germany does not have this problem with all the skilled workers coming here from everywhere.

They forgot China

Almost there:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/china-population

And this could possibly be overcounting, population could be 1.28B not 1.4B:

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/researcher-questions-chi...

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