Regional Growth In Central Europe: Long-Term Effects Of Population Structure

In a simple growth model we explore the current and future growth effects of the population structure. Regional growth in 227 regions of 6 countries in central Europe (see Figure 1.0) is explored as how they depend on the young and old dependency ratio. The young dependency ratio (YDR) is defined as ratio of the less than 20 years old and the old dependency ratio (ODR) as the more than 60 years old divided by the total population. We found that there is a medium sized negative correlation of these demographic dependency ratios on regional growth and the long-term forecast for the year 2020 is for most regions rather bleak.