PopDigests

Immigration within the borders of the European Union is driven by social and economic forces that are strongly linked to the legal framework of each state. As John Palmer and Mariola Pytliková found in their recent study, labour market laws influence migrants’ destination choices. In fact, the labour market restrictions imposed by some EU member states after the two enlargement rounds (2004 and 2007) have influenced both the magnitude and composition of intra-European migrant flows.

In the years to come, the size of the working-age populations (WAP) will decline in most countries of the European Union. This might have a negative impact on economic growth measured as the increase in the total volume of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). At the same time, the share of the working-age population will start to decline in all EU countries. The shrinking share of the population in their working ages is called the demographic burden and might have a negative impact on the standard of living, measured as GDP per capita.

Across Europe, there have been consistent educational improvements for both women and men over time. Higher levels of education have been traditionally associated with lower mortality rates. Ivana Kulhánová, et al. estimate how further improvements in educational attainment influence future mortality reductions.

Some immigrants stay in their host countries while others decide to return home, but return motives can be remarkably diverse. Migrants may decide to return if they have not been able to improve their lives through migration, a situation that can perhaps be read as a ‘failure’. Others instead may make the same decision only when they have saved and remitted enough to invest in their country of origin, making the return a measure of success.

Education is one of the most important determinants of citizens’ attitudes towards immigrants. Positive attitudes can be related to a liberalising effect from education, which fosters tolerance and egalitarian values, while negative views can be driven by the perception of so-called intergroup competition: when natives tend to feel threatened by the presence of immigrants, for example, in the labour market.

Population ageing has recently boosted an extensive debate about how to measure individual aging. The chronological age, even if conventionally used, is somehow limited because it does not capture people’s own representation of aging, that is, how old people actually feel they are. In their study on the United States, Valeria Bordone and Bruno Arpino test the association between subjective age, as an alternative measure to chronological age, and two important social roles for older adults: having grandchildren and providing grandchild care.

Living conditions can affect the quality of life of older people in two different ways. The first is objective and regards the characteristics of dwellings. The second, instead, is subjective and respond to elder’s perceptions of how they accomplish the fulfilment of their needs. Both, together with their individual characteristics, build what has been defined as “residential satisfaction”. In their study Celia Fernández-Carro, Juan A. Módenes and Jeroen Spijker analyse both the levels of residential satisfaction and its determinants among older Europeans.

Relationships, their typology and meanings have profoundly changed over the past decades in Western societies. These changes constitute an important challenge for welfare states because policies need to take into account new living arrangements in order to support all types of families. Nora Sánchez Gassen and Brienna Perelli-Harris examine the incidence of cohabitation and match it with the associated legal regulation across eleven European countries and Russia in order to quantify the number of couples that fall outside the scope of classical family policies.

Currently people are living longer lives but not everyone reaches advanced age in good health. This is because health conditions vary among population groups and across territories, giving space to so-called health inequalities. As Benedetta Pongiglione and Albert Sabater confirm in their study, one of the most important features influencing differences in individual health outcomes is socio-economic status: In Europe, overall, highly-educated individuals tend to live longer and in better health than their less-educated counterparts. 

Polish migration within Europe has increased sharply since Poland’s entry to the European Union in 2004. Over the past decade, Poles are the largest group of foreign nationals settling in the Netherlands. Still, little is still known about the link between migration and family behaviours of this group of immigrants. Tom Kleinepier, Helga A. G. de Valk, and Ruben van Gaalen address this gap in their latest study and find six different types of family life paths among young adult Polish migrants. They also identify important gender differences in family and migration behaviour.