Research
Europe's demographic crunch is real and largely irreversible in the near term — fertility is well below replacement across all EU member states, the workforce is shrinking, and even optimistic migration or automation scenarios cannot fully offset the decline — but the economic consequences are significantly less severe than headline dependency ratios suggest, since productivity-weighted measures show only a ~10% burden increase by 2060 rather than the ~62% implied by raw age ratios. The central tension is that the three main responses — managed migration, automation, and pro-natalist policy — each face hard limits: migration cannot meaningfully shift working-age shares per Bloom et al., automation's net employment effects remain methodologically contested and distributionally uneven, and fertility policy gains largely disappear under tempo-adjustment. What the briefing leaves unresolved — and what would be load-bearing for any policy conclusion — is the lifetime fiscal net contribution of migrants by skill level and welfare regime, the distributional impact of automation on specific low-skill workers, and whether domestic institutional reform (higher female participation, later retirement, productivity investment) can do the heavy lifting that neither migration nor automation reliably can.
Falling birth rates have set EU population numbers on a course of gradual decline as of 2026, according to EU and UN projections.
On 1 January 2025, the EU population was estimated at 450.6 million people and more than one-fifth (22.0%) of it was aged 65 years and over.
3.55 million babies were born in the EU in 2024. The total fertility rate stood at 1.34 live births per woman in the EU in 2024, ranging from 1.01 in Malta to ...
Find out more about labour shortages and surpluses from 2024 in the report here, or use the interactive dashboard below and explore the data yourself.
In 2024, amid overlapping crises and transitions, Eurofound provided evidence on jobs, wages, housing and inclusion. Its research tackled labour ...
The 6-7% estimate for job displacement from AI is the team's baseline assumption, but they write that displacement rates could vary from 3% to ...
Our findings show that firms adopting robots tend to employ more workers overall, particularly those with low and medium education levels.
The European Union has a robot density of 219 units per 10,000 employees, an increase of 5.2%, with Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Slovenia in the ...
This column examines the link between AI-enabled technologies and employment shares in 16 European countries, finding that occupations potentially more exposed ...
In this line of research, the JRC Employment and Skills team has used statistical data on industrial robots to better understand their impact on employment, ...
In 2022, 5.1 million immigrants came to the EU from non-EU countries. This is more than double compared with 2.4 million in 2021. In all EU countries, except ...
But as much as the need to attract skilled workers is a shared concern, the EU lacks a common labour migration policy that lives up to the challenge. In this ...
Migration and asylum in Europe – 2025 edition provides key data and trends on migration and asylum. It looks at topics such as people migrating to the EU, ...
In addition, the negative net migration reduced the population by 6% (7 million) by the end of the studied period. However, these effects were ...
Evaluation of the Skilled Immigration Act · Plans for central agency to attract skilled foreign workers · Refugee employment continues to rise.
Closing the gender participation gap by lifting women's labour supply would increase the European labour force by six per cent (see Figure 2); the impact ...
In the EU-28 Member States,. Iceland and Norway (EU-28+) we estimate 128 million adults with the potential for upskilling and reskilling (46.1% ...
A win-win solution: connect European businesses with Africa's remote workforce to address labor shortages and create economic opportunities.
This paper provides a systematic, multidimensional demographic analysis of the degree to which negative economic consequences of population aging can be ...
This policy brief considers how demographic change could affect Europe's place in the world and how to strengthen this place as a consequence.
Rapid population ageing and decline, resultant labour shortages, and emigration have become major concerns for all European countries. Both ...
“When birth rates fall, countries can reap a “demographic dividend,” when a growing share of workers and few dependents fuel economic growth.
We introduce DeM-MoE, a Demographic-Aware Mixture of Experts model that learns to represent subjective judgments by routing inputs to expert ...
These findings imply that structural shifts in the labour market are exacerbating disparities between low-skilled and highly skilled individuals, not only ...
It has been called Europe's demographic time bomb: Older people are living longer, while younger people are having fewer children.
Global population aging is reducing the age-based demographic dividend that has long supported economic growth. This study identifies the skill-based dividend ...
We have also demonstrated that the immigrant flows impact on unemployment rate is very weak. The factors that are exerting the most significance ...
542000 industrial robots were installed in 2024, yet the capability is lagging. Inside the automation-labor paradox reshaping global manufacturing trends.
This study empirically analyses the demographic causes of population decline in 732 sub-national areas extending across 33 European countries.
Hungarian policy makers pointed at the TFR increasing from a record low of 1.25 in 2010 (when Viktor Orbán returned to power as prime minister) ...
This chapter sets the scene for the thematic part of this OECD Employment Outlook 2025, which is devoted to ageing and the labour market.
This publication provides possibilities to investigate EU and country level data and compare trends over several years.
“Our evidence shows that robots increase productivity. They are very important for continued growth and for firms, but at the same time they ...
This article looks at pathways to success for the children of immigrants (often called the second generation) in Europe.
Results show that increasing house prices are associated with lower fertility, which can partly be explained by the lower propensity of young ...
Convergence in aging mainly depends on changes in the population structure of East-European regions. Cohort turnover plays the major role in promoting ...
Ratio between the number of persons aged 65 and over (generally economically inactive) and the number of persons aged between 15 and 64. The values are ...
The work culture in the US is a lot friendlier than the one in Europe, in the sense that US employees are much more warm, cordial, and friendly with one ...
BRUSSELS — Millions of workers, including many migrants, will need help to cope with rapid shifts in the job market brought by automation ...
A continued focus on productivity-enhancing investments in human and physical capital is needed to offset the impacts of ageing. Europe's ...
Rather than indicating widespread labour shortages, these trends point to structural mismatches driven by the misalignment of worker qualifications, job ...
Overview of methodologies / approaches used in EU and SPC opinion polls towards / related to migration;. • Main differences and similarities between attitudes ...
Labour market implications of robot adoption depend not just on displacement but also on the productivity gains that they bring. These ...
In the EESC's view, the EU must offer a united response to the multiple challenges that it is currently facing: for example, geopolitical ...
The fear of job loss is real; Cedefop found that 15% of adult workers are afraid they may lose their job due to AI, a figure that rises to ...
The consistent increase in the aging population in comparison to the working-age population is likely to reduce the labor supply—leading not only to a rise in ...
Many policies are poorly justified or financially unsustainable in the long term, driven more by ideological considerations than by scientific ...
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