ABSTRACT
The countries of the developed world face a future of diversity and of considerable uncertainty. They have emerged from the 'first demographic transition', leaving behind the high vital rates and youthful populations of the 18th and 19th centuries, and emerging into the 21st into what was expected to be a calm post-transitional world of low vital rates and older societies. There is no 'solution' to population ageing short of a return to much higher rates of population growth or mass age-specific euthanasia. In Germany, Italy and Greece only net immigration prevents actual population decline. Population decline itself, as opposed to natural decrease, is further deferred until later, because net immigration, already high into most European countries, is expected to continue and possibly to increase. Only those Eastern European countries which combine very low fertility with modest immigration or net immigration were actually losing population in 2050, a process reinforced by persistently high death rates inherited from the communist period.
