What should be the goal of population policies? Focus on ‘Balanced Human Capital Development’

Many governments in Europe report in international enquiries that they are dissatisfied with the current demographic trends in their countries. The further one goes to the east of the continent, the stronger the publicly expressed concern. While the prime minister of Bulgaria calls his country’s ‘demographic crisis’ the number one policy priority, the president of Belarus even speaks of a national ‘demographic security crisis’, implying that this may require equally drastic action as a security crisis at the military level. Less dramatic in tone but equally urgent in its message, the President of the European Commission repeatedly called Europe’s demographic trends one of the three main challenges facing Europe, the other two being globalisation and technological change. What do these policy makers have in mind when they refer to demographic crises or challenges? In the eastern part of Europe, where most countries (with the notable exception of Russia, which received many Russians from other former Soviet republics) have experienced significant population declines since the political transformation around 1990, the concern seems to be very deeply rooted and associated with the fear that the country will lose its population base. Bulgaria, for example, had close to 9 million inhabitants in the late 1980s; now (2008) it has only 7.6 million and is projected by Eurostat (2008) to further shrink to around 6.5 million in 2035 and 5.5 million in 2060. This loss of more than onethird of its entire population, which is also associated with very rapid population ageing, is indeed significant, particularly in the context of traditional thinking, where more population meant more soldiers and more power, but also in view of the fact that throughout human history, population shrinking has always been associated with misery and national decline. In western Europe the story is less