Population Ageing from the Perspective of Labour-Force Participation: The Case of Croatia and Serbia

Vladimir Nikitovic , Institute of Social Sciences, Belgrade
Sanja Klempic Bogadi, Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, Croatia

Croatia and Serbia, neighbours and former parts of the same country, have for many years now been among the countries characterized by the highest ageing dependency ratios in the world, and the same trend is expected to continue in decades yet to come. Given such a demographic perspective, we wanted to explore what impact of change in economic activity of population might be on the ageing indicators of these countries, particularly that both have comparatively low participation rates in European context. Therefore, we included the labour force dependency ratio, which takes into account the actual participation in the labour force. The medium variant of the United Nations’ WPP2022 projections was taken as the most probable future of population dynamics in Croatia and Serbia. We used activity rates from the 2022 Labour Force Survey (LFS) to build three scenarios of future activity rates. Apart from the constant one, the other two assume a gradual increase in activity in these two countries to reach the current activity pattern for: a) the EU-27 average (baseline sc.) and b) Sweden (Swedish sc.) by 2060. We suggest that population ageing in countries like Croatia and Serbia can have a completely different interpretation in the coming decades given the expected increase in economic activity of the population as a reflection of the improvement in the educational level and the overall development of society. Some preliminary results show that the dependency burden might be even lower than today during the whole projection period in both countries.

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 Presented in Session P2. Health, Mortality, Ageing - Aperitivo