Natural or migration-driven decline? Demographic components of systemic depopulation at local level: the case of Austria.

Emilio Cameli , University of Molise
Miguel Sanchez-Romero, TU Wien and IIASA
Carlo Lallo, University of Molise

This paper investigates systemic depopulation in Austrian municipalities between 2001 and 2023 by combining the Systemic Depopulation Areas Index (SyDAs) with a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) analysis of population dynamics. While SyDAs has been designed for policy purposes—as a simple binary index to detect self-reinforcing population decline based on stochastic ARIMA trends—the SVD decomposition identifies the main components of population change. The results indicate that 736 out of 2,114 municipalities experienced population decline; however, according to SyDAs, only 68 exhibit characteristics of systemic depopulation, primarily located in Styria and Carinthia. Most SyDAs municipalities combine negative natural growth and net outmigration, confirming the index’s ability to capture path-dependent demographic decline. The SVD results are consistent with those obtained from SyDAs, indicating that Factor 1 explains over 95% of the total variance and represents the general depopulation trend, whereas Factors 2 and 3 capture temporal shifts associated with migration flows. This suggests that the SyDAs index can capture the complexities of systemic depopulation while remaining a simple and useful tool for policy planning.

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 Presented in Session P8. Demographic Trends, History, Data and Methods