"How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Wroclaw?"
That's me, quoting myself from the introduction to: "Are Ukrainian Farmers an Endangered Species?":
Probably.
There are a few things going on that point in that direction. First you have the country's total fertility rate at 1.4, only two-thirds of the 2.1 replacement rate, tied with poster child Japan in the who's-going-extinct competition. And lower even than famously-low-birthrate-Russia, which at 1.8 has a comparative population boom. So there will literally not be enough people to take up the job.
And from the Asia Times, November 2:
Putin’s plan to destabilize Western nations with a flood of refugees hasn’t worked but Ukraine’s demographic decline is certain
Since the Russian invasion in February, about 8 million Ukrainians have fled the country. After eight months of fighting – and with no end to the war in sight – the prospect that many refugees may never return will exacerbate an ongoing population decline in Ukraine.
The mass exodus will make it harder for the country to remain a viable independent state with a functioning economy.
Ukraine’s total fertility rate at the time of its independence in 1991 was 1.8 births per woman – already below the replacement rate of 2.1. By 2001 it had dropped to 1.1, and after a slight uptick to 1.5 in 2012, it stood at only 1.2 in 2020.
Between 1991 and 2014 – the year of Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the Donbas – Ukraine’s population dropped from 51.7 million to 45.1 million. By 2020, if you exclude the territories already occupied by Russia, the population had dropped to 37.3 million. Long before the 2022 invasion, Ukraine was in danger of running out of Ukrainians.
Things are much worse now that more than a fifth of the remaining population currently lives in exile. These people are not a random cross-section of Ukrainian society. Nearly all are women and children – only 8% of refugees are men aged 18–59, as most men in this age category are barred from leaving.
The better-educated are also overrepresented: 75% have some tertiary education and nearly half have university degrees. They are also young – people 60 years and older account for only 17% of the refugee population, much less than their share in the Ukrainian population as a whole.
More may still leave. Attacks by Russia’s newly acquired Iranian-made drones, focused mainly on civilian infrastructure, are in part meant to terrify people and encourage them to flee across the border.
By destroying the country’s productive assets, these attacks further exacerbate the already dire state of the Ukrainian economy. GDP is forecast to decline by 35% in 2022, and the rate of inflation for 2022 is 30% – largely driven by the fiscal deficit, which is 23% of GDP....
....MUCH MORE
