ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the constantly changing nature of Eastern Europe and the innate hazards of prognostication of population trends—which is not unlike weather prediction. Obviously governmental policy plays a vital role in population trends. But even though there are many signs of the critical function of official policy—perhaps most clearly evident in the effect of legal abortion in some countries of Eastern Europe—there is no clear indication that any country of Eastern Europe actually has confronted the issue of basic population policy. Instead, it appears that the traditional piecemeal approaches have been used, approaches in which population is treated in reference to some other aspect of the state, such as economic policy or regional development policy. Although there are many ways of expressing growth, one of the most graphic is to estimate the number of years needed to double the population of the specific country.
