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France and Ukraine would appear to be very far apart in terms of economics and history. Yet their demographic profiles were very similar for more than fifty years. France Meslé, Gilles Pison and Jacques Vallin investigate the long-term trends at work and tell us how that chance resemblance has given way to profound differences.
With approximately the same land areas, France (552,000 km^sup 2^) and Ukraine (604,000 km^sup 2^) also had about the same number of inhabitants (41.5 and 41.3 million respectively in 1939, Fig.1) (1) on the eve of World War II. Despite their very different political systems, the two countries had at the time not dissimilar economies, still largely dependent on agriculture. But today, France's population outnumbers Ukraine's by nearly 30% (60.6 million compared with 47.2 million as at 1 January 2005). How did this happen? Under both Soviet rule and Independence, achieved in 1991, Ukraine's population dynamics have been quite different from those of France. Are recent events in Ukraine likely to alter that pattern? Before forming an opinion, we need to look at the long-term fertility, mortality and migration trends.
* Different initial potentials
Although the French and Ukrainian populations were of roughly the same size before World War II, their development potential was radically different. Whereas France in the 1920s presented the age structure of a population aged by a long-term decline in fertility, Ukraine's population was still very young (Fig.2) and so held a strong potential for growth, as compared with the near-equilibrium between births and deaths in France. The only feature common to the two age pyramids was the deep notch carved out in both countries by the First World War birth deficit. The Ukrainian population might have been expected to explode with the combined effect of longer life expectancy and fairly high fertility rates, and the French population to remain static as it had done for almost a century. This was where history intervened. Ukraine suffered two terrible calamities one after the other - the famine of 1933 and the slaughter of World War II - each of which erased millions of individuals from its population [1]. The 1933 famine cancelled out the 4 million person increase that had resulted from ten years of rapid population...