Global Scenario Narratives

Over the past decades, international migration has become by far the most important force behind European population change: without migration, the population in Europe would have been declining already since the mid-1990s. With this development, the importance of migration as a social and political concern has intensified significantly, and migration has become a highly debated topic in Europe and the rest of the world. Although in many EU countries migrants fill existing and emerging gaps in the labour force, and therefore tend to have a positive impact on the economic development of these countries, there seems to be a growing fear that the current levels of migration are unsustainable. As international migration has major implications for societies and economies, forward looking analyses of migration are valuable tools for many domains of policy making. The aim of this report is to build further on this growing literature on migration scenarios, paying close attention to the main insights of previous studies while also exploring new ways to formulate migration scenarios that allow for greater flexibility in the domains and developments covered