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Demographic Ageing in the Mediterranean: The End of the Spatial Dichotomy Between the Shores?

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Abstract

The Mediterranean is too often presented as a heterogeneous geographical area. Demography has helped to create this narrative of a Mediterranean of contrasts in which the different shores are systematically opposed: a northern shore in decline, with low fertility rates and an ageing population, as opposed to the young and fertile southern and eastern shores, which are experiencing rapid growth. However, this spatial dichotomy is gradually disappearing due to demographic transition: population growth and fertility are in decline, and the disparities between the different areas of the Mediterranean are vanishing. Moreover, demographic transition automatically gives rise to an ageing population. While the varied populations of the Mediterranean are currently differentiated by their levels of ageing, it is inevitable that these levels will converge in the future. This paper studies this future convergence, including the hypothesis that the southern and eastern shores will catch up with the northern shore. It also envisages a potential challenge to the spatial dichotomy of demographic ageing in the Mediterranean. To this end, we will go beyond the national frameworks generally used for studies of the Mediterranean as a whole and examine each Mediterranean country at a sub national level. After creating demographic projections based on 4 prospective scenarios, we will use various methods (cartography, spatial statistics, etc.) to express how the southern regions will catch up, how the space will change, and how the spatial dichotomy of ageing in the Mediterranean will evolve.

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Notes

  1. The notion of "near-equilibrium" is used by Chesnais (2011) ("quasi-équilibre" in French). This is the equilibrium of the pre-transitional demographic regime. This regime is characterized by zero or very low population growth. Nevertheless, this regime has fluctuations, sometimes significant, in mortality and birth rate, hence the notion of "near-equilibrium".

  2. Data taken from World Population Prospects: the 2015 Revision. https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/.

  3. We consider all countries with direct access to the Mediterranean Sea to be Mediterranean countries; we also add Portugal, Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Jordan.

  4. Refer to Doignon (2016) and Chesnais (1992) for more details on the mechanical aspect of the link between aging and demographic transition.

  5. We chose "expectation of life at birth" as an indicator because it provides information on the general state of mortality within a population.

  6. Note the exceptions of Albania, Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose expectation of life at birth was around 55 years.

  7. We chose not to dwell on this recent rise in fertility, called "counter-transition" by some (Courbage 2015a). The countries concerned are Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt (Ouadah-Bedidi et al. 2012; Ambrosetti 2014). Experts have not yet reached a consensus on this issue. It could be due to a cyclical effect linked to the Arab revolutions, a potential return to traditional values, or a number of other factors. In the case of Algeria, one could imagine a post-Civil War effect similar to the baby boom that followed the Second World War, since this rise in fertility has been ongoing for more than 15 years now. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that these rising fertility trends will actually cancel out the sociocultural changes linked to the demographic transition (Courbage 2015b).

  8. The RDMA is a population-weighted relative inequality index obtained by adapting the DMM (Dispersion Measure of Mortality). The methodological details of this index can be found in Moser et al. (2005) and Shkolnikov et al. (2003).

  9. We should specify that the extent to which the southern and eastern shores will catch up with the northern shore depends on the prospective scenario. The effect is quite pronounced in the median scenario and the model transition scenario, and less so in the decelerated transition and rising fertility scenarios. In the last two scenarios, the regions of the southern and eastern shores are over-represented in the "very young" and "young" categories. Compared to the other two scenarios, the regions of the southern and eastern shores are much less likely to share the same ageing category as regions on the northern shore.

  10. These regions have either become younger in absolute terms, i.e. their proportion of the population aged 65 or over has decreased, or they have aged more slowly than the Mediterranean average and become relatively younger.

  11. For the neighbourhood matrix, we used the 12 closest neighbours. We used this neighbourhood matrix for all the spatial statistics in this section.

  12. For example: Meknes, Salé, Khemisset, Chlef, Oran, Nador, Blida, Mostaganem, Tripoli, Marrakech, Fez, Tangier, Alexandria, Damascus, etc.

  13. With the exception of the two outlying categories ("very young" and "very old"). The former includes almost exclusively regions of the southern and eastern shores, and the latter regions of the northern shore.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Isabelle Blöss-Widmer for her proofreadings and advise. This article was written as part of the SoDeMoMed project, funded by ANR Transmed (ANR-12-TMED-0005).

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  1. CNRS, LAMES, UMR 7305, Aix Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence, France

    Yoann Doignon

  2. CNRS, ESPACE, UMR 7300, Aix Marseille University, Université Côte d’Azur, Avignon Université, Avignon, France

    Yoann Doignon

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Doignon, Y. Demographic Ageing in the Mediterranean: The End of the Spatial Dichotomy Between the Shores?. Spat Demogr 8, 85–117 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40980-019-00054-2

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