Poland’s Turn from a Sending to a Receiving Migration Regime: The Impact on Population Ageing

Anna Janicka , University of Warsaw
Agnieszka Fihel, Institut national d'etudes démographiques / ICMigrations
Marek Okolski, University of Warsaw

Most studies of the components of the process of population ageing agree that throughout the course of the Demographic Transition, mortality and fertility decline are the most significant factors, with net migration usually exerting a negligible but sometimes apparently inconsistent impact on the age structure of the population. Meanwhile, the concept of the Migration Transition (MT) points out to the fact that the processes of in- and out-migration which accompany changes in vital processes and usually result in a change from a sending migration regime to a receiving one (in net migration terms), have different dynamics and determinants. In this study, we concentrate on Poland, demographically the largest post-communist country of Central Europe, which remains a sending country but registers increasing numbers of arrivals from abroad. We develop migration forecasts for in- and out-migration, for nationals and foreign citizens separately (in both cases), based on a model calibrated on panel data for European countries at different stages of the MT and combine them with a population forecast for Poland based on the UN framework. The results of our analysis confirm that, in the long run, the overall effect of migration on the process of population ageing is smaller than the effects of mortality or fertility. We are able to show, however, that this effect differs at various stages of the migration transition and that both emigration and immigration, when considered separately, have a significant impact on the population age structure, comparable to that of fertility (albeit visible at different stages).

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 Presented in Session 67. Migration Measures: Methodological Issues