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  • News | 19 Feb 2025

Demographic outlook for EU’s rural regions: Significant disparities in population trends across urban, intermediate, and rural territories

A newly released JRC Working Paper reveals that urban regions are expected to experience population growth primarily due to economic opportunities attracting migrants. In comparison, intermediate and rural regions are projected to decline in population, with remote rural regions being particularly affected.

Migration and Demography
Urban and rural areas

Natural population change, which describes the difference between births and deaths, is trending downwards across all regional typologies. However net migration, defined as the difference between immigrants and emigrants, is projected to compensate for this natural change only in urban regions. The implications of these demographic changes are far-reaching, predicting a smaller productive population leading to reduced economic growth and simultaneously increasing demand for pensions and healthcare services in remote rural regions.

This JRC working paper utilises the Demography-Economy-Land use interaction (DELi) model to scale down national demographic projections from the 2021 Ageing Report to the sub-national level. This enables a more detailed analysis of local population trends covering the period 2000-2022 and projections up to 2040 at the NUTS3 regional level.