https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6947-3859
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ABSTRACT
Using data for over four decades, we examine the ageing of Swedish municipalities and if there has been convergence or divergence across time and space, where we differentiate across the urban–rural hierarchy. As migration is claimed to be a moderating factor in the ageing of places, we assess how the share of immigrants relates to ageing patterns. Our findings show that the share of older individuals increases in more peripheral localities and that there has been convergence across municipalities. However, the share of foreign population is negatively related to the ageing profile of a place.
DATA AVAILABILITY
The research data are confidential.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
2. Of course, large-scale immigration has numerous effects on the receiving country. It has, for example, been discussed whether large-scale emigration even alleviates the economic burden of countries associated with ageing populations (Bonin et al., Citation2000).
3. We can observe that generally in Europe, immigrants are more concentrated to densely populated areas than the native-born population (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Citation2016).
4. Defined as the standard deviation divided by the mean.
5. What convergence measure to use has been hotly debated after it was pointed out that estimations of β-convergence due to the regression to the mean may be statistically flawed (Quah, Citation1993b). Sala-i-Martin (Citation1996a) conjectured that analyses of β-convergence are valuable to evaluate the outcomes of analyses of σ-convergence and that it is not motivation enough to disregard β-convergence measures just because of the risk of some econometric problems.
7. See https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Population_structure_and_ageing
9. A lower average age of the population in urbanized municipalities results in higher birth rates and lower mortality rates than in more rural municipalities, which functions as a centripetal force that drives the concentration dynamics (Grafeneder-Weissteiner & Prettner, Citation2013). The overall patterns illustrated are equal to what we should expect according to what the literature on urban economics indicates about demographic processes (Rozenfeld et al., Citation2011).
10. We further accounted for non-linear effects by adding the squared value of the share of the population over 65 and the average age. The findings show signs of increasing marginal effects.
11. Once again, we tested for non-linearities, and the results indicated marginal increasing effects only when using average age for the regional categories Metropolitan and Cities.