The purpose of this paper is to analyze demographic- and economic structural changes across regions in Europe, as well as the connections between these two types of processes. The relations between urban and rural areas are given a special focus, as population changes in rural areas cannot be analyzed without taking the urban population development into account and vice versa. This is particularly important with regard to migratory movements where urban in-migration, in many cases, is dependent of rural out-migration. It has also been shown that rural areas have different migration patterns where many areas in the surroundings of big cities have experienced a positive population development as an effect of both natural population increase and net in-migration. The opposite is, however, the case in peripheral and remote rural areas where contrary development paths often seem to be the case. Moreover, out-migration also results in eroding reproduction potentials as out-migration of young women accentuates the effects of the drops in fertility. Natural population change has, thus, lost its primacy as the dominant factor behind regional population development both in positive and negative ways as the European regions-urban as well as rural-have been transformed from high fertility societies to low fertility ones. Instead, migration has become the main driver with regard to population development. These processes are all related to the economic-structural changes taking place in both urban and rural regions, which is the focus of this paper.
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