Demographic Trends and Population Prospects in Southeastern Europe

Three basic questions are under consideration in today’s demographic community: a) the European geography of demographic behaviors allows us to consider the geopolitical area of S.E. Europe as uniform and clearly distinguished from the rest of Europe, b) to what extent the observed recent evolutions in the ex "socialist" S.E. European countries are registered in the long term or/and have been affected by the seismic policies and socio-economic changes as well as the consequent difficulties the inhabitants of these countries meet during the transition period and finally c) the demographic perspectives of these countries and their direct and indirect implications. In this article we do not aspire to give answers to all of the above questions. Initially, we confined ourselves to a synthetic presentation of post-war demographic evolutions (giving indirectly an answer to the question of the existence or non-existence of a demographic profile of the Balkans). Then we focused our attention to the expected demographic trends and the problems they raise on the one hand, to the labor market of these countries on their course to free market, and on the other hand, to the migration pressures these countries might bring upon the neighboring E.C. countries.