Population ageing poses various challenges for health and social systems. One possible policy response to population ageing is higher immigration which is controversially discussed in many countries. Studies on replacement migration however have shown that immigration can barely be seen as the sole solution to population ageing in developed countries. In Denmark, municipalities are fully responsible for the provision, delivery, and financing of elderly care within the country. Hence, challenges due to an increasing share of older persons are not only pertinent to national-level policies but are especially relevant at the regional and local levels.

Combining data from Statistics Denmark with Eurostat’s EUROPOP2019 projections, we show spatial differences in population ageing for 11 Danish NUTS-3-regions and 98 municipalities. To assess the potential of migration to counteract population ageing, we estimate the theoretical amount of migration needed to maintain the age structure (2023-2050) and compare it to recent migration rates. To take varying life expectancy into account, we adopt the prospective age approach. This concept is based on the idea that characteristics (such as health) depend more on the average remaining life expectancy than on chronological age.

Our results reveal notable differences in the level of population ageing across Danish regions. The prospective old-age dependency ratio (ratio between prospective old-age population and prospective working-age population) is lowest in urban and highest in rural regions. Moreover, even within regions, we find considerable spatial variation between municipalities. These differences in age structure are also reflected in the magnitude of net migration potentially needed to offset population ageing in the next decades. Given recent migration rates, offsetting population ageing through higher immigration seems to be an unrealistic scenario in most regions. Our analyses underline the importance of regional policy and planning to deal with the specific challenges of population ageing in Danish regions.

Urban and spatial demography have long focused on trends in urbanization and suburbanization and their demographic determinants. Population shifts across the urban-rural continuum can alter local demographics, affecting housing and social infrastructure accessibility for various demographic subgroups. In the context of suburban areas in Europe, especially Germany, there is consensus that most countries are undergoing suburbanization. Yet, detailed understanding of its effects at finer spatial scales, which could distinguish suburban from rural population changes, remains scarce. While remotely-sensed data has proven valuable for urbanization analysis based on urban forms, these approaches often lack direct ties to population data. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by combining a novel urban-rural gradient classification with gridded census and register-based population data to analyze urbanization and suburbanization trends in Germany between 2011 and 2021. Results point to a general trend of metropolitan growth, with an increase in urban and suburban populations, at a ratio of approximately 2:1. Population increased to a lesser extent in rural areas and towns not part of the 80 largest cities’ agglomerations. Statistic tests show that differences in growth rates among the settlement types are significant. These results may help to contextualize suburbanization trends observed from internal migration data.

Most population-level evidence on the link between the reproductive history of women and their post-reproductive mortality is based on high-income countries with population registers. Here we enhance the existing population-level evidence by analysing data that was collected as part of the population register of the Communist German Democratic Republic (GDR). We use a 100% individual-level sample of the GDR census of 1981, and the complete mortality register data for the years 1982-1990. A comparison with Sweden, where fertility trends were very similar at the time, will allow us to explore whether the link between fertility outcomes and post-reproductive mortality differs dependent on the political and economic context. Based on Cox proportional hazard models, using women with two children as the reference group, first findings for the East German GDR show that mortality differences by number of children born are more attenuated than in other countries. This seems to be mostly driven by deaths due to neoplasm and external causes. For cardiovascular diseases, other causes and all-cause mortality, however, we identify a typical u-shaped pattern where women with two children are displaying the lowest mortality. Over the next months, we will specify a similar model for Sweden, allowing us to present at the DGD a direct comparison between East Germany and Sweden. In addition, we will extend our analysis of the GDR data, by, for example, taking socio-economic characteristics and type of occupation into account.

Seasonal trends in fertility are found in several contexts and are affected by societal and environmental factors. In particular, major social shifts could lead to changes in such trends. This paper documents how birth seasonality in East and West Germany changed across time and in particular after the reunification happened in 1989. We use birth counts by month from the Human Fertility Database divided by East and West Germany from 1946 to 2017. We normalize the number of births by the number of days in each month and construct a birth index. We then use descriptive statistics to show in which months births are concentrated across seven decades and which is the month with the highest and lowest number of births in the two regions over time. We observe similar birth seasonality in East and West Germany in the decades from 1946 to 1976 showing a peak in the first months of the year and a second peak in September. In the 70s West Germany starts to diverge showing the emergence of a single peak of births in late summer. Shortly after reunification, East Germany start to resemble the seasonal trends of fertility found in West Germany. The findings raise questions about the potential causes behind East Germany's rapid adaptation to West Germany's fertility patterns post-reunification, suggesting significant social and economic influences. This research underscores the impact of major societal changes on fertility trends, providing insight into the dynamic nature of birth seasonality within different sociopolitical contexts.

Fertility indicators traditionally focus on female reproductive behavior, neglecting the nuanced contributions of males. This study addresses this gap by conducting a subnational analysis of male and female fertility differences, utilizing high-quality register data from Australia, Finland, Germany, France, and the United States. Examining fertility timing and quantum over time and across countries, our research employs decomposition techniques and regression models to unravel the intricacies of male and female fertility disparities. The findings reveal substantial subnational disparities exceeding national-level results, emphasizing the influence of contextual factors. Population imbalances, sex-selective migration, mortality differences, and age-related fertility patterns emerge as potential explanations for observed variations. Importantly, our results underscore the limitations of relying solely on one-sex fertility indicators, emphasizing the need for nuanced approaches in fertility research.The subnational analysis brings forth previously unknown heterogeneity, surpassing insights derived from national-level studies. Assessing the impact of geographic regions, human development, and welfare states through a cross-country subnational design provides a comprehensive understanding of contextual influences on fertility. In conclusion, our research advances the understanding of male and female fertility differences, urging a reconsideration of one-sex fertility indicators. By uncovering subnational nuances, we offer a nuanced perspective that informs demographic research, policy, and societal planning.

Today, more people than ever live in one-person households (OPHs). Sweden’s OPH population started to grow in the 1960s, and today the country exhibits one of the highest proportions in the world, reaching almost 40% of all households. Despite describing Sweden and the Scandinavian countries as frontrunners, surprisingly, little is known about the long-term changes in the composition of the Swedish OPH population. Using large-scale register data covering the entire Swedish population at 5-year intervals, we analyze the development of the demographic and socioeconomic (SES) characteristics of OPHs from 1960 to 2018. In the analyses, we focus on how the composition of OPHs has changed regarding age, gender, civil status, parental status, education, income, and urban/rural context. The prime focus is on the socioeconomic determinants. Our findings show that there have been substantial changes over time, especially in the association between civil status and SES and the probability of living alone. The sharp growth of divorce in the 1970s was an important driver of increased OPHs. This was especially evident among men aged 30-45 that rarely attained custody of children before the 1990s. For SES, we find a shift from a positive to a negative gradient among women and an increasingly negative gradient among men. Today low-SES men and women in Sweden are increasingly selected into OPHs, and the SES patterns across sexes have converged.

Many studies have addressed fertility variation at the sub-national regional level among women, but our knowledge on regional variation in men’s fertility remains limited. The current study assesses gender differences in the timing and chances of entering first-time parenthood across regions. First births are an important focus in the contemporary setting, given increases in childlessness in many countries and first births’ growing importance for cross-country variation in fertility levels. We hypothesize that, based on differences in gender roles and sex ratios between regions, (i) men are subject to weaker regional variation in their first birth timing than women, (ii) gender differences in the timing of first births are less pronounced in urban centers, and (iii) these timing differences translate into similar patterns in the eventual chances of entering parenthood. This study builds on descriptive analysis and data on cohorts born in 1963–1970 in Finland, France, the Netherlands, and Sweden.

Register data provide a reliable data source to conduct societally relevant research on minorities and hard-to-reach populations such as individuals with a disability. Current research, however, focuses mainly on single disabilities defined through the ICD-10 (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems) classification, thereby lacking a comprehensive overview of populations with a disability. This study aims to extend this narrow and specific perspective on disability by conceptualising a framework to categorise three macro-types of physical, intellectual or sensory disabilities in linked individual-level register data. This novel approach will contribute to the literature by providing a methodological tool to comprehensively identify individuals with a disability from a young age. This study will use various register-based data sources from the Finnish population registers, i.e., medical care use, social security insurance utilisation and school curricula information, to first establish a new identification strategy for the three macro-types of physical, intellectual or sensory disabilities; second, assess identification similarities and divergences from the conventional ICD-10 classifications; and third, identify overlaps between these categories and other co-morbidities. The newly developed framework will enable population-based research on individuals with a disability, paving the way to providing insights into universal trends in this population across several life course domains. It will, therefore, make a substantial contribution to the field of disability studies and the broader disciplines of social epidemiology and demography.

Family ties are a fundamental dimension of individuals’ lives which might mitigate or exacerbate individual health disadvantage. In contrast to natives, who have a social and cultural advantage to navigate life-course adversities, immigrants need to make integrative efforts that are often entirely on their side, or on a limited family network. Family ties may mitigate these negative effects. Among the different types of family ties, a particular important role for health is played by spouses. Exogamous marriage, defined as marriage between people of different geographical origin, is often overlooked as a health determinant. Although the research on intermarriage is rich, not enough attention has been paid by scholars to the relationship between exogamous marriage and health of the spouses. Our aim is to fill this knowledge gap. We hypothesize that immigrants married to natives display better health outcomes compared to immigrants married to immigrant spouses; that the better health conditions are explained by the socioeconomic characteristics of the partner and that this relationship will hold after accounting for socioeconomic conditions prior to marriage. We use register-based longitudinal data on Finland to analyze the association between the place of birth of the spouse and inpatient and specialized outpatient care records. We focus on individuals aged 18-59 and their spouses (of any age), and we study men and women separately. Preliminary results for men show an increased risk of being hospitalized for psychopathological conditions for Finnish men married to immigrant women, which is fully explained by the sociodemographic controls included in the analyses, and a decreased risk for immigrant men married to immigrant women, that persists when considering the socio-demographic controls. Next steps include a detailed analysis by countries of birth, and a focus on the role of income.

Background: Social inequality is demonstrated in most health outcomes, yet the influence of socioeconomic status on reproductive health, such as timing of puberty, is debated. Early puberty is a risk indicator for adult diseases, emphasizing the need to determine potential causes of earlier puberty timing. The aim of this study was to investigate how parental socioeconomic position were associated with timing of puberty in girls and boys.

Methods: We studied 7890 girls and 7489 boys from a population-based Puberty Cohort nested within the Danish National Birth Cohort (DNBC). Highest completed educational level among parents was used as the indicator of socioeconomic status. Information on pubertal development was obtained every six months throughout puberty. We estimated mean monthly differences for the average age at attaining multiple pubertal milestones using multivariable interval-censored regression model.

Pre-liminary results: When analyzing all pubertal milestones simultaneously, the pubertal milestones were on average attained earlier in girls of low-grade professional parents (-0.7 months [95% confidence interval (CI): −1.6; 0.2]), skilled parents (-1,4 (95% CI: −2.3; −0.4) and unskilled parents (-2,7 (95% CI: −3.8; −1.6) compared with girls of high-grade professional parents. Boys of unskilled parents attained the pubertal milestones earlier (-1,2 (95% CI: −2.3; −0.1) compared to boys of high-skilled professionals, but no clear association was observed for boys of low-grade professional or skilled parents.

Conclusion: The results of our analysis indicate that lower parental socioeconomic status is associated with earlier timing of puberty in both girls and boys.

Menarche (the first occurrence of menstruation) is an event with critical importance in women’s fertility and fecundity. Growing evidence suggests a shift in the social gradient in age at menarche (AAM): While advantaged children used to experience menarche relatively early, this pattern now appears to have reversed in some Western societies. This observation raises an intriguing possibility that AAM could be one axis by which social inequalities reproduce, as early menarche may increase the risks of certain diseases and reduce opportunities for attaining higher education. As yet, it is unclear whether the social gradient in AAM has indeed changed in recent cohorts, and if so, whether socioeconomic differences actually underlie the change in AAM across generations.

The present study uses a unique compilation of cohort data linked to Norwegian register data and censuses: 85,000 female respondents from the Cohort of Norway, and 100,000 mothers and their daughters from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study. We document a secular trend of declining AAM throughout the 20th century, but unlike previous studies from the US and UK, we do not find a positive social gradient in AAM by income for earlier cohorts. In recent birth cohorts born 2002-2007, AAM further declined and the social gradient therein increased. Using first differencing regressions, we find stronger decline in AAM in daughters compared to their mothers if the mother grew up in household with lower socioeconomic position (0.19 years difference between the top and bottom percentile; CI 0.07-0.30), and also if the daughter's socioeconomic position is worsened compared to that of the mother during her own childhood (0.15 years if the position drops from the top to the bottom percentile; CI 0.06-0.26). These findings will be expanded by incorporating information on parental education, and additional cohort data for recent birth cohorts.

This contribution offers an overview of the determinants of international migration – at the micro, meso and macro levels. Focusing on some of the drivers we place emphasis on the personal- and family-level processes that inform the migration decisions. The most common profile of people who intend to migrate is that of the young male (not exclusively!), more educated and with consolidated networks abroad. Regardless of the income level, the older individuals are, the less likely they are to express the desire to migrate.

In contemporary societies of both the Global North and South where a growing but still small proportion of the population is longing to be elsewhere, this propensity to migrate becomes an important driver of social change and development as a key aspect of the process of migration decision-making. Although the migration aspirations have often been labelled as poor determinants of migration, without them and the desires for change the other drivers would not lead to migration. These latter drivers are inherent in international disparities regarding demographic, social and economic structures and dynamics.

In parallel, the multiplicity of motivations and the complexity of contemporary migration dynamics have highlighted the limited explanatory capabilities of categorisations such as: forced, economic, seasonal, environmental,…migrant.

In this context there is an urgent need to reformulate the study of the drivers of international migration by going beyond the primacy of economic rationality and the sole logic of the push-pull models of international migration.

Drawing on the results of the EU-Horizon2020 FUME project, the contribution proposes an understanding of the patterns and drivers of international migration developed within the analytical framework of the aspiration/ability model. The key question of the project was: what contribution can the discussion on the drivers of international migration make to the formulation of narratives of future migration scenarios?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 triggered the largest and most dynamic refugee situation in Europe in decades. The EU reacted quickly and in an overall compassionate spirit to the emerging crisis. By activating the Temporary Protection Directive, it provided refugees from Ukraine with quick access to temporary residence permits and basic rights as regards welfare, health care, work and education.

As scholars have observed, the EU’s response to people fleeing from Ukraine has been significantly different from how it has behaved towards other refugee situations in the recent past and until today. The arrival of asylum seekers has for many years raised concerns, and policymaking has been characterized by attempts to control and limit their number. This is especially true since what is widely known as the refugee ‘crisis’ of 2015, which first prompted welcoming attitudes across several EU countries and then an upsurge of new deterrence strategies and political controversy.

This paper seeks to explore and explain the main differences between the EU’s management of the Ukrainian refugee emergency and other major refugee arrivals in the recent past. It then considers possible lessons that the handling of the Ukrainian refugee situation might hold for EU migration and asylum policies at large. The analysis shows that the Temporary Protection Directive is a useful tool in emergencies; that the EU visa regime plays a major role for facilitating – or obstructing – safe and legal access to EU territory; that secondary movements of people seeking protection can be a good thing rather than a problem; and that flexible models of responsibility-sharing between the EU Member States can work better than static models of solidarity.

The Russian war in Ukraine which has escalated in February 2022 to the whole territory of Ukraine has brought an unprecedented flow of Ukrainian refugees to Poland. According to UNCHR there are more than 6.3 million Ukrainian refugees in the world. Since the re-escalation of Russian war in Ukraine there has been recorded 16 million border crossings through Ukrainian-Polish border by November 2023 and till then nearly 1.6 applied for various asylum and protection status. Before the war there was already more than 1 million labour migrants from Ukraine in Poland. It means that in the short time the inflow of Ukrainian migrants to Poland was massive, as never experienced before. It shows also that Ukrainian refugees have had plenty of migrant networks in Poland which facilitated their arrivals. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly we are going to assess skills, explore resilience and learn about perceived social support by Ukrainian migrants and refugees in Poland as indicators for their labour market integration and a development of human resources, also needed after a return to Ukraine. Secondly, our aim is also methodological. The data is collected via a unique interactive portal My Migration (www.mymigration.academy) which is available in Ukrainian, English and Polish and gives an instant feedback to respondents. It uses world validated scales relevant for each topic. In social sciences we usually take information from our respondents, giving very little in return. By developing this portal both technologically and methodologically we wanted to change it and reciprocate our respondents who are in need of knowledge about their resources. Therefore My Migration portal opens avenues for research impact via making this instrument also used by practitioners, e.g. job advisors, NGO experts etc.

Our study investigates family dynamics among forced migrants from Eritrea and Syria to Germany. We analyse the partnership and childbearing patterns of women and men. We pursue the following research questions: 1) What are the union formation and fertility behaviours of refugees in the years before and after migration and during transit stays? 2) How are family events and forced migration trajectories interrelated? 3) Which demographic, socio-economic and migration-related factors are associated with diverse family dynamics of refugees? Our empirical analyses draw on data derived from the quantitative survey "Forced Migration and Transnational Family Arrangements - Eritrean and Syrian Refugees in Germany" (TransFAR) collected in 2020. This survey covers 1,450 respondents and is Germany-wide representative of recent refugees from two major countries of origin of forced migration to Germany. Our analytical strategy is threefold: First, we describe the patterns and prevalence of marriage and childbearing, taking a multisited perspective and accounting for several locations of the respondent: in the country of origin, in transit countries and in Germany at time of arrival as well as at time of the survey. Second, sequence analysis techniques are performed, accounting for marriage and fertility trajectories from 5 years before arrival to Germany to 5 years after arrival. Third, the associations between marriage-fertility trajectories and individual demographic, socio-economic and migration-specific factors as well as contextual characteristics are estimated. Preliminary results show that an important share of married individuals experiences a birth in the first years upon arrival in Germany, indicating that the partnership status at arrival is crucial for fertility outcomes at destination. Furthermore, we find considerable differences between genders.