The Demographic Footprint of Economic Development: The Case of Two Cycladian Islands

This paper examines the dynamic relationship between economic development and the demographics of population for a group of islands in the middle of the Aegean Sea, namely the Cyclades, in the period 1860-2011. This period covers the greatest part of demographic transition, which for the Cyclades started in the mid-nineteenth century. In every stage of the transition, the changes in mortality and fertility levels tended to destabilise the relationship between population and the limited resources of the islands. Migration is the key factor in understanding the demographic regime of these islands. Either negative or positive (emigration or immigration), population mobility has always been and still is the element that regulates natural increase and determines the real increase of the population. Whenever rates of natural increase were too high, emigration acted as a counterbalancing factor by taking population away from the islands, while when rates of natural increase reached very low levels from the 1970s onwards due to low fertility, immigration came as a substitute. Two of the Cyclades islands, namely Paros and Naxos, are used as cases studies for a closer focus on these islands during the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century and especially in the period 1951-2011.