El envejecimiento de la población en Aragón

Abstract

Various authors have studied the ageing of the Spanish population and its uneven distribution. While on a national scale, the index of ageing was 0.59 in 1986, implying that 12.18% of the Spanish population were more than 65 years old, the geographical distribution of the old in the autonomous regions, the provinces and the towns is very uneven. This inequality is even higher when ageing is studied accordig to the size of the nuclei of population. Rural towns which have less than 2,000 inhabitants, according to statistics of the Spanish official body, the I.N.E. in the Census of the Spanish Population, provide figures of an index for the old of higher than unity; indicating that more than one person older than 65 years old for every child younger than 16 years old living in them. If towns with less than 2,000 inhabitants are differentiated into four categories - less than 101, from 101 to 500, from 501 to 1,000 and from 1,001 to 2,000, it can be observed that the proportion of old people is in inverse proportion to the towns size, and the index is 5.5 in towns with less than 100 inhabitants. These alarming figures refer to towns which account for only 8.5% of the Spanish population, but 73.6% of all towns in Spain, adn more than half the area of the country and make us consider it necessary to carry out a study of these figures with a view to the perspective of the depopulation and abandonment which it implies.