Subnational Depopulation via Natural Decrease in Europe and the United States in the Early 21st Century

Natural decrease results from an excess of deaths over births in the population; that is, in a particular time period the population has more deaths than births. Most demographic analyses of natural decrease have been conducted among the counties and subareas of the United States. In this paper we analyze subnational natural decrease among the countries of Europe and the states of the United States. Using data from EUROSTAT (2011) for the subareas of the countries of Europe for the circa 2000-10 time period, we ascertain, country by country, the degree of natural decrease in their respective county-level areas. In Europe, eight of the 22 countries had more than one-half of its counties experiencing natural decrease in the time period. Almost 60 percent of all the counties in Europe experienced natural decrease in the circa 2000-10 period. Of all 3,221 counties in the U.S., almost 27 percent of them experienced natural decrease in the 2000-09 period. In our paper we also report bi-variate analyses of several variables shown in the literature to be significantly associated with natural decrease, e.g., population size, and we make comparisons between the different dynamics of natural decrease in Europe and in the U.S.