ABSTRACT
An objective of this book was to highlight the dramatic demographic changes that Central and Eastern Europe has been experiencing since the early/mid 1990s that led commentators to refer to CEE as turning ‘From Red to Gray’ (title of a World Bank publication by Chawla, Betcherman, Banerji et al. 2007). These demographic trends are set to continue for decades to come. Population projections until the year 2050 confirm the prospect of a shrinking population in CEE (Pirozhkov, Safarova and Scherbov 2007). Regardless of whether or not population ageing is an unintended side effect of the socio-economic transformation from ‘communism’ to ‘capitalism’ as Hoff (2008a) claims or merely the result of a – compared with Western Europe – late occurring second demographic transition, or indeed a third demographic transition as Chawla et al. (2007) argue, current demographic changes have serious implications for CEE societies and have hit them hard at a time when they are still busy trying to cope with the aftermath of the post-communist transition.
