Population Replacement and Migration in Historical Perspective: Depopulation in Castile & Leon and Concentration in Madrid in the 20th Century

Luis Alberto Del Rey Poveda, University of Salamanca
Maria del Mar Cebrian, Universidad de Salamanca

This paper analyses the population reproduction in Castile&Leon and Madrid from 1900 to 2005. In historical perspective, there are two main problems for this analysis: first, the lacking of data, particularly migration data; second, the lacking of accurate measures of reproduction that takes into account the three components of population dynamics. In order to analyse this process, first, we have taken Calot’s interpretation (1984) of TFR to estimate a net migration constant of female population in reproductive ages; second, we have used the Birth Replacement Ratios, an indicator that incorporates the effects of all three demographic components in the evolution of births. This indicator has two advantages with respect to other methods: it is a retrospective indicator that does not assume hypothetical scenarios about the impact of migration in the dynamic of the population; and it is possible to decompose the effect of each component in the generational replacement process.