ABSTRACT
With a population of 65.8 million in 2013, France is the second biggest country in Europe. 1 The demographic development is marked by a birthrate of 2.0 children per woman and by immigration. Although there were 15.5 million persons under the age of 20 in 2012, the population grows older: the proportion of young people has decreased from 32.2 per cent in 1962 to 23.5 per cent in 2012. Besides, the number of immigrants has slowly grown over the past 30 years from four million immigrants in 1982 and 4.3 million in 1999 to 5.3 million in 2009. Two million came from Europe, 1.6 million from North Africa, 700,000 from Sub-Saharan Africa and 500,000 from Asia. In 2008, one-third of them had the French citizenship, which means that around 3.6 million non-nationals lived in France (relatively stable since 1982).
