The total EU population is projected to continue growing until peaking around 2045, but the populations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are shrinking. Eurostat projects Latvia to lose 10 percent of its population between 2010 and 2030, while Lithuania is projected to lose 8.6 percent and Estonia 4.5 percent. From 1990 to 2011, Lithuania's population fell from 3.6 million to 3 million. Over the same period, the population of Latvia declined from 2.6 million to 2 million, while Estonia's fell from 1.5 million to 1.3 million. These declines were partly due to low fertility rates, which have remained below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman (the number of births needed to keep population levels stable) for more than two decades.
Meanwhile, over the past two decades, life expectancy increased from 71 years to 73 years in Lithuania, from 70 to 73 in Latvia and from 70 to 76 years in Estonia. Life expectancy is still longer in Western European countries such as Germany (80 years) and France (81 years), but it is shorter in neighboring Russia (69 years) and Belarus (70 years). By 2030, according to Eurostat, the elderly are expected to make up 21.7 percent of Estonia's population, 22.1 percent of Lithuania's and 22.2 percent of Latvia's.
Baltic governments have been attempting to address their demographic challenges with a host of policy changes, but these can do little to stem the overall demographic shifts that will shape the coming decades. The aging populations, for example, are unlikely to get much younger, since the drop in birthrates stems from a series of economic and cultural changes common among modern societies. Instead, the governments of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia will focus on mitigating the effects of demographic change by, say, providing social and economic benefits for families with children, while still trying to reduce emigration and draw back their diasporas.
