Estonian Human Development Report 2016/2017 Estonia at the Age of Migration EHDR 2016/2017 Estonian population projection according to different migration scenarios

摘要: A number of industrialised countries are currently experiencing slowing population growth and decreases in the size of their labour forces. Most countries of Europe, as well as China, will be faced with this same situation in the next decade. Estonia has been experiencing this demographic reality already for the quarter of a century. Compared with the beginning of the 1990s, the size of the Estonian population is smaller by more than 250,000 people, out-migration being one of the contributors to the population decline. Recently, the continuing population decline has received vocal attention from entrepreneurs’ associations as well as other organisations monitoring the country’s economy, such as the Bank of Estonia (Tamsar 2016). The main concern from an economic point of view is the pressure on increased wages due to declining numbers of working age adults. Fewer people available to join the workforce create a situation of heightened competitiveness to hire employees thus resulting in higher wages. The second major concern is related to the declining number of taxpayers relative to the groups dependent on tax income.Increasing immigration has been suggested as one of the solutions to problems arising from declining population. Arguments favouring immigration in order to augment the working age population are based on the Statistics Estonia projections that analyse potential Estonian demographic changes until 2040. The Statistics Estonia projections cover a relatively short timeframe in the population development context, thus not allowing evaluation of long-term implications of various demographic transformations. To fill this gap …