The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw) has issued a report showing that Ukraine is unlikely to recover demographically from the consequences of the war, thus making reconstruction extremely difficult. Ukraine “faces a dramatic demographic challenge, similar to Europe after World War II,” the study, titled “The Demographic Challenges to Ukraine’s Reconstruction,” concluded. (https://wiiw.ac.at/the-demographic-challenges-to-ukraine-s-economic-reconstruction-dlp-6620.pdf)
“There will simply be a lack of people to enable Ukraine to recover from the destruction and to get the economy going again. The problem will be particularly severe in the Eastern and Southeastern regions of the country most affected by the war,” a release introducing the study says. “Above all, a massive outflow of well-educated women of working and childbearing age, who make up about 70% of the adult refugees, is likely to sustain the population loss for a long time. In addition, many children and young people have left the country, as they constitute about a third of refugees. ‘Many of them will no longer be there when it comes to rebuilding the war-torn country. We assume that more than 20% of the refugees will not return to Ukraine,’ says Maryna Tverdostup, Economist at wiiw and author of the study.”
The study has used a comprehensive forecasting model, which looks at various scenarios regarding the duration and military escalation of the war. “In doing so, the development of age-specific fertility, age- and gender-specific mortality, age and gender-specific refugee outmigration rates, and age- and gender-specific return rates in the population are modelled for four scenarios and incorporated in the stochastic population growth model.”
