Demography of Austria

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

8,772,865 people currently live in Austria (as of January 1, 2017) - 72,394 people or 0.83% more than at the beginning of 2016.

The population has been increasing for years, in particular due to increased immigration . For the year 2050 a population of almost 9.5 million people is expected; the Austrian capital Vienna is expected to exceed the 2 million mark in 2029.

Compared to other Central European countries, Austria has a relatively balanced age structure.

Population development

Parts of the following table, "Average annual population", are not adequately documented (for example, individual records ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.
The indication "Statistics Austria" is much too rough in view of the sheer number of tables in this source. The numbers from 1870 onwards could be proven. From which table in "Statistics Austria" (URL) do the figures before 1870 come from?
Average annual
population
according to Statistics Austria
date Residents
around 1527 1,500,000
around 1600 1,800,000
around 1700 2,100,000
1754 2,728,000
1780 2,970,000
1790 3,046,000
1800 3,064,000
1810 3,054,000
1821 3,202,000
1830 3,476,500
1840 3,649,700
1850 3,879,700
1857 4,075,500
1870 4,520,000
1880 4,941,000
1890 5,394,000
1900 5,973,000
1910 6,614,000
1913 6,767,000
1919 6,420,000
1923 6,543,000
1930 6,684,000
1939 6,653,000
1951 6,935,000
1961 7,086,000
1971 7,500,000
1981 7,569,000
1988 7,585,000
1991 7,755,000
2001 8,042,000
2011 8,389,000
2016 8,740,000
swell before 1870: unknown
from 1870

Population history

The 1869 census in Austria-Hungary was the first census that meets today's criteria. On the territory of what is now the Republic of Austria, the number of inhabitants rose steadily until 1910, the last count before the start of the World War. Until the "breakup" of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 at the end of the First World War, the strong population increase in what is now the territory of the republic was largely due to internal migration from the crown lands . The job-seeking migrants from poorer regions settled mainly in the big cities, especially in Vienna. Citizens of old Austria and old Hungary could move freely in the area of ​​the Danube Monarchy and settle anywhere.

As a result of the First World War (according to the 1919 census), the population shrank by 347,000 people. Many former civil servants from the former crown lands had also "returned" to their new nation states. The population rose continuously until 1935, but then decreased again to 6,653,000 people until the outbreak of World War II in 1939. When the first population figures were determined after the end of the war on the basis of the food cards in 1946, a new high had been reached with around 7,000,000 people due to the high influx of refugees.

By 1953 - refugees and displaced persons had largely returned to their homeland or migrated on - the population had fallen to 6,928,000 people. The following high birth rates caused the population to rise again to a new high in 1974 to 7,599,000 people in Austria. Thereafter, decline and increase alternated until from 1987 the population began to rise again noticeably. Not least due to increased immigration from the 1990s onwards, Austria's population rose to 8,260,000 at the end of 2004, which corresponds to around 1.8% of the EU population.

The civil population present was counted between 1754 and 1857. From 1869 to 1981 the figures were based on the ten-year census, with updates between the censuses and the civil population from 1869 to 1923 and the resident population from 1934 to 1981. 1982-2001 censuses continued to be held, and the annual average population was determined retrospectively from updates. Since 2002 the population figures have been based on the Central Residential Register, from which they can be determined at any time. Therefore, censuses to determine the population are no longer necessary in Austria.

forecast

According to forecasts by the Austrian Federal Statistical Office , births and deaths in Austria will remain in balance for about 20 years, after which the births will probably be below the death rate, which will lead to a higher average age. However, immigration will increase the population to around 9.5 million by 2050.

Only in Vienna , as the only one of the nine federal states, will the average age and population growth be lower than the national average. The latest forecast assumes that Vienna will grow three times faster than assumed (24 instead of 7 percent). Vienna could be a city of two million by 2029. This results in problems in the social infrastructure and in residential construction, where an annual construction output of 10,000 residential units is required as early as 2013.

Population movement

Today Austria - as one of the wealthiest countries in the world - is a country of immigration . However, this has not always been the case. At the time of industrialization there was a great internal migration from Bohemia and Moravia, where the same Austrian citizenship was valid at that time as in today's Austria. After 1918, up to the Second World War, more Austrians emigrated than foreigners a year.

Exceptions to the traditional tendency to emigrate from Austria were the waves of immigration from Hungary, first around 1920 due to political turbulence, and then in 1956 after the Soviet Union put down the Hungarian uprising , as well as from Czechoslovakia in 1968 after the end of the Prague Spring . Another exception was the short-term immigration trend from the German Reich when the National Socialists came to power in the German Reich in 1933 and primarily urged Jews to flee. This came to an end in 1938 at the latest after Austria was annexed to the German Reich .

Since the enormous economic and prosperity growth that began in the 1950s and made Austria a prosperous country to this day, the migration balance has turned. Guest workers were recruited in a targeted manner, later refugees kept reaching Austria, for example from the former Yugoslavia during the Yugoslav wars . Many economic refugees came from Turkey to Europe and thus also to Austria. In recent years, immigration from Germany to Austria has also increased, as the chances of finding a job here were or will be greater than was / is the case in Germany. That is why many Germans, especially from the areas of the eastern federal states, were driven to the Austrian tourist areas. Today, with 109,000 German citizens (as of January 1, 2007), after the Serbs and Montenegrins, as well as the Turks, they are already the third largest group of guest workers in Austria.

In 2008 around 1,441,500 Austrians had a migration background. This is understood to mean the immigrants of the 1st and 2nd generation, i.e. those people who were born abroad and immigrated to Austria (1st generation), as well as those people who were born in Austria to parents born abroad are (2nd generation). The proportion of the population with a migration background in Austria is 17.5% of the total population. Vienna has the highest proportion of residents with a migration background (35.4%).

emigration

When Austria was still a country of emigration: Austro-Hungarian passengers on a ship to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century.

At the time of industrialization, from around 1850, records of emigration from Austria are available for the first time. At that time, however, Austria also included numerous areas that are now independent nations or belong to other nations.

Between 1876 and 1910 around 3.5 million (other figures give up to 4 million) residents of the dual monarchy emigrated because they were unemployed and hoped for better living conditions elsewhere. Of these approximately 3.5 million, 1.8 million were from the cisleithan half of the empire and 1.7 million from the transleithan half. Almost 3 million of them went to the United States, 358,000 chose Argentina as their new home, 158,000 went to Canada, 64,000 to Brazil and 4,000 to Australia. The rest was spread across other countries.

In 1907 alone, half a million people emigrated. The governments of Austria and Hungary were concerned that there were many fit young men among the emigrants. The search for the cause was not set out until later. The connection between emigration, industrialization and rural exodus is certain. Between 1901 and 1905 65,603 properties, 45,530 of which were small parcels, were auctioned to the public in Austria alone. Emigrated friends and family members often wrote back enthusiastically from “over there” - sometimes ship tickets that were paid for at the same time were enclosed. Over 60,000 people emigrated from Burgenland in the 1920s.

The most important ports of departure for the emigrants were Hamburg and Bremen, from where the major German shipping companies, the North German Lloyd and the Hamburg-America Line , departed. In the middle of the 19th century, a boat trip to New York with the first steamships took around a month, but around 1900 the journey time was only a week in good weather. From Trieste , where the Austro-Americana was the only Austrian emigration line, a journey took another 15 days. Annually 32 to 38 trips were made to the USA. The travel conditions for the mostly poor emigrants were often miserable. For the shipping companies, who saved the comfort for the less affluent passengers wherever they could, the emigration business was extremely lucrative and therefore very competitive.

Most of the emigrants came from Galicia in what is now Poland and Ukraine. 1907–1912 there were 350,000, as emerged from an interpellation by Polish Reichsrat members to various Austrian ministers on March 12, 1912.

A large wave of emigration began again during the Great Depression in 1929 and was reinforced in the politically unstable 1930s, when the Nazi threat was specific and forced 1938 again many people to emigrate, mostly Jews and other persecuted by the Nazis populations. This included a large part of the Austrian scientific and cultural elite of that time. Switzerland, too, became increasingly attractive at this time, not least because it was the only neutral country in Central Europe that was spared the war. In 1950 there were around 22,000 Austrian citizens in Switzerland. By 1960 this number rose rapidly to around 38,000, making Austrians the third largest foreign population in Switzerland after Italians and Germans. At the beginning of the 1970s, the number of Austrians living in Switzerland peaked at 45,000. Increased naturalizations and also stronger remigration to Austria prevented a further increase. At the beginning of 2005, around 33,000 Austrians lived in Switzerland, not counting dual citizenships. Many of them once came to Switzerland to work there temporarily. Many, however, settled in well in their "temporary" home and built up their new existence there, so that returning was no longer an option.

immigration

In the 1960s and 1970s , because of the prevailing labor shortage, so-called guest workers were recruited by companies directly in their countries of origin. Many of these families (see family reunification ) are now in the second or third generation in the country. There was a major wave of immigration in the 1990s because of the Yugoslav wars .

The foreign share of the Austrian resident population in 2018 was around 1,395,880 people or 15.8%, of which around 703,280 came from EU and EFTA countries. Around half of all immigrants or their descendants live in the greater Vienna area, where around a quarter of the entire population of Austria is based. The rest is mainly distributed among the other metropolitan areas.

Citizens with permanent resident rights from countries that do not belong to the EU come primarily from the former Yugoslav countries of Serbia , Bosnia and Herzegovina , Montenegro and Macedonia (together around 65% of permanent residents), Turkey (approx. 21%) and the People's Republic of China (approx. 1.3%) as well as Egypt , India , the Russian Federation , the Philippines , the USA , Ukraine , Thailand and Iran (between 0.5 and 1% each). Their total number on May 30, 2007 was 451,737 people.

In the academic field, the immigration of university staff from neighboring Germany can be observed, especially in the field of medicine, but also in the humanities. Another type of so-called academic immigration of German citizens occurs through the growing number of those who have completed a university degree in Austria and do not return afterwards. Tax legislation (e.g. foundation law ) was and is a reason for some people to move to Austria. Famous people who have taken up residence in Austria include Franz Beckenbauer and Ralf Schumacher . A phenomenon that has only appeared in recent years is seasonal workers from eastern Germany who are employed in tourist areas.

Asylum situation in Austria

In Austria, the number of asylum applications rose continuously in recent years from 11,012 applications in 2010 to 28,064 in 2014. Experts from the Ministry of the Interior forecast an increase to at least 80,000 in 2015 instead of the originally stated 40,000. Measured against the population, that is far more than in Germany. In the first quarter of 2015, the increase in asylum applications was already 149.7% instead of the expected 43%.

As of April 1, 2015, 33,859 people were in basic care (accommodation, meals, insurance, pocket money, legal advice). The federal government (60%) and the federal states (40%) bear the costs for the basic service. Expenditure is expected to double in 2015. Added to this are the costs for the asylum procedure of 1,400 euros per refugee. Once an asylum application has been approved, recognized refugees are entitled to receive needs-based minimum income.

In 2018 Austria recognized the highest number of asylum seekers per capita in an EU-wide comparison. There were 2,345 recognized asylum seekers for every million inhabitants, around 20% more than in second-placed Sweden. The recognition rate in the first instance in Austria was 44% (EU average 37%), the recognition rate in final appeal decisions was 54% in Austria (EU average 38%).

Which entered into force on 1 January 2006 amendment to the asylum law put one hand the common practice firm and led the other to a tightening not only for future asylum seekers , but also for a long time living in Austria, but illegally entered persons. An application for a residence permit (residence or settlement permit) is only possible with legal entry - or by leaving and applying from abroad.

The possible duration of detention has been extended from six to ten months; Detention pending deportation can also be used at any time during an ongoing asylum procedure. The mere suspicion that a person entered the country via a safe third country or Dublin country is sufficient to impose detention. The possibility of force-feeding has been introduced for hunger strikers. According to the new Aliens Act, people who were born as children of immigrants in Austria can be deported if they have been sentenced to at least two years in prison. The place of birth is generally not relevant, as Austrian citizenship law has always followed the principle of “ius sanguinis” (literally: “right of blood”), according to which a person's citizenship is linked to that of their parents.

Accepting and assisting people who have entered illegally is punishable by up to six months in prison. A prison sentence of up to ten years threatens people who grant escape assistance. The strictness of the new legislation is publicly and legally controversial, as family members are never obliged to report other family members under criminal law. However, there is no change in sight.

Of the three possible types of work permits , asylum seekers have only been able to receive an employment permit that is valid for a maximum of one year since January 1, 2006 . It has to be applied for every year by the employer and is only valid for this one company. Asylum seekers who had already received an exemption certificate or a work permit before 2006 can no longer extend them. After the validity has expired, the company must apply for an employment permit if it wishes to continue employing the asylum seeker. After an asylum application has been rejected, there is no longer any possibility of legalization.

health

Health expectation

EU comparison Healthy life expectancy at birth (2016)
  • The GLJ estimates are provided for the 27 EU Member States using the EU-SILC data for 2016
    (see figure on the left).
  • The analyzes of the values ​​for healthy life years indicate significant inequalities between the European countries.
  • The health expectation in Sweden is 16.0 years higher for men than in Austria .

See also:
Health system in Austria

See also:
health expectation

Life expectancy

The average life expectancy in Austria is currently (2012) 83.3 years for women and 78.3 years for men (in 1971: 75.7 women and 73.3 men). The infant mortality rate is 0.45%. The suicide rate is traditionally high: around 400,000 Austrians are generally affected by depression, around 15,000 try to kill themselves each year; The number of suicides in Austria is twice as high as that of the road fatalities: every six hours an Austrian dies by his own hand.

Population structure

Population density

Population density of Austria

The most densely populated federal state in Austria is the capital Vienna , which has around 4,500 inhabitants per square kilometer (km²). With a clear second place is Vorarlberg with 149 inhabitants / km², followed by Upper Austria with 122 inhabitants / km². All other federal states have between 50 and 100 inhabitants / km².

Population composition

According to the microcensus labor force survey of 2008, 1,441,500 people (or 17.5% of the total population of Austria) have a migration background.

This population group includes those people whose parents were born abroad. This group can in turn be subdivided into first generation migrants (people who were themselves born abroad) and second generation migrants (children of immigrant people who were, however, born in Austria). The group of first generation immigrants comprises around 1,078,100 people, while that of second generation immigrants comprises around 363,400 people.

language

According to Article 8 of the Federal Constitution (Federal Constitutional Law (B-VG) from 1920), German is the state language of the Republic of Austria. It is the mother tongue of around 98% of Austrian citizens. Austrian German is actually spoken and written in Austria , a high-level national standard variety of the pluricentric German language , whereby Austrian German differs from Standard German in Germany in particular in terms of vocabulary and pronunciation, but also in grammatical peculiarities. The Austrian dictionary , in which the vocabulary is summarized, was initiated by the Ministry of Education in 1951 and has been an official set of rules above the Duden since then . The use of some expressions in the area of ​​goods traffic and the kitchen language was contractually regulated when Austria joined the European Union .

The German language is often spoken in the form of one of the many Upper German dialects that belong to the dialect families of Alemannic (spoken in Vorarlberg and Tyrolean Ausserfern ) and Bavarian (spoken in all federal states with the exception of Vorarlberg). Seven million Austrians speak a Central or South Bavarian dialect or a colloquial language influenced by these dialects.

In addition, Slavic and other languages ​​are spoken by autochthonous minorities. The long-established Burgenland - Croatian , Slovenian and Hungarian ethnic groups in Austria are entitled to native-speaking school lessons and official communication. Burgenland -Croatian and Slovenian are additional official languages ​​in the administrative and judicial districts of Styria, Burgenland ( Burgenland-Croats ) and Carinthia ( Carinthian Slovenes ) with a Croatian or Slovenian or mixed population. Furthermore, in the municipalities of Oberpullendorf , Oberwart , Rotenturm and Unterwart in Burgenland, Hungarian is an official language with equal rights alongside German ( Burgenland-Hungary ). The long -established Roma population also has their own language. In addition, an unknown number of sedentary Yenish people live in Austria. To what extent there is still language competence in Yenish is unknown.

religion

The basilica of Mariazell
Islamic Center Vienna

Since religious affiliation was no longer allowed to be recorded in the last register census in 2011 due to legal restrictions, Statistics Austria only provides the results of the 2001 census. According to this, 73.6% of the population declared themselves to be Roman Catholic and 4.7% to one of the Protestant churches ( Protestantism ; predominantly the Augsburg Confession , more rarely the Helvetic Confession ). About 180,000 Christians, 2.2% of the Austrian population, were members of Orthodox churches. About 15,000 believers joined the Old Catholic Church , around 0.2% of the population.

As in Germany, the number of members of the Volkskirchen is declining; at the end of 2016 the proportion of Catholics with 5.16 million from 8.77 million was only 58.8% and thus clearly represented two thirds of the Austrian population within a few years fallen below. In relative terms, the decline was greater among the smaller Protestant churches, with only 3.4% declaring themselves to be members of one of the Protestant churches in 2016. In 2015, however, there were around 500,000 Orthodox Christians in the country. Their number has therefore increased significantly compared to 2001.

The largest non-Christian religious community in Austria is Islam , which has been a recognized religious community since 1912. In the 2001 census, around 340,000 people, that is 4.3%, committed themselves to the Muslim faith - according to the Integration Fund, there were 515,914 believers in 2009, which corresponds to 6.2% of the total population. According to estimates by the Ministry of the Interior and the Austrian Integration Fund, around 700,000 Muslims lived in Austria at the beginning of 2017. The number rose sharply, mainly due to migrants, births and refugees from the Arab region. According to a study from 2017, 34.6% of Austrian Muslims have “highly fundamentalist” attitudes.

The Vienna City Temple , the only surviving historical synagogue in Vienna, is the center of the Israelite religious community

For Judaism , about 8,140 people profess. The vast majority of them, around 7,000, live in Vienna. According to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien , there are 15,000 nationwide.

A little over 10,000 people profess Buddhism , which was recognized as a religious community in Austria in 1983 . To Hinduism , which is considered in Austria as a "registered religious confessional community", 2001 3.629 people profess census.

20,000 people are active members of Jehovah's Witnesses . Its legal recognition as a religious community was decided in 2009.

According to the last survey in 2001, around 12% of the population (around one million people) do not belong to any of the religious communities legally recognized in Austria. It is estimated that the number of atheists and agnostics in 2005 ranged from 18% to 26% (1,471,500 to 2,125,500 people).

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Statistics Austria: Press. In: www.statistik.at. Retrieved December 11, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Vienna grew by 43,200 inhabitants - wien.ORF.at. In: wien.orf.at. Retrieved June 14, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Average annual population 1870-2017. Statistics Austria , accessed on February 13, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Statistics Austria : Population development 2006 to 2050
  5. ↑ Population status 2007  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Statistics Austria, September 2007.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.statistik.at  
  6. ↑ 50 years of the Burgenland Community on ORF March 23, 2007
  7. ↑ HF Mayer, D. Winkler: Austria was in all ports - the Austro-Hungarian merchant navy. Vienna 1987, p. 88 ff.
  8. ↑ Neue Zürcher Zeitung . 13./14. August 2005, p. 15, with reference to figures from the Swiss census and the Austrian Consulate General in Zurich.
  9. ↑ Traude Horvath, Gerda Neyer (ed.): Emigration from Austria, from the middle of the 19th century to the present. Böhlau-Verlag, Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, 1996.
  10. ↑ Population on 1.1.2018 by nationality or country of birth and municipalities. (PDF) STATISTICS AUSTRIA, May 17, 2018, accessed on April 29, 2019 .
  11. ↑ Federal Ministry of the Interior : Aliens Statistics, May 2007 (PDF)
  12. ↑ Asylum and Migration: Solution “will cost us a lot of money” diepresse.com, accessed on August 21, 2015.
  13. ↑ 50,000 applications this year. In: Die Presse online, May 15, 2015.
  14. ↑ "Please get off" instead of passing through to Germany. faz.net, June 4, 2015.
  15. ↑ a b Andreas Wetz: Migration: 40,000 asylum seekers forecast. In: The press online. April 17, 2015, accessed April 24, 2015 .
  16. ↑ 7.05 p.m., 25 April 2019: Eurostat: Austria took in the most asylum seekers per inhabitant. April 25, 2019. Retrieved April 29, 2019 .
  17. ↑ WZ Online: 40 percent fewer asylum seekers in the EU. Retrieved April 29, 2019 .
  18. ↑ EuroStat statistics explained: Healthy life years statistics , accessed on April 22, 2019
  19. ↑ Regulation (EC) No. 1177/2003 of the European Parliament and of the Council of June 16, 2003 on Community Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC)
  20. ↑ statistik.at
  21. ↑ medical-tribune.at ( Memento of the original from February 18, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.medical-tribune.at
  22. ↑ Register count . In: statistik.at. Retrieved February 11, 2017 .
  23. ↑ 2001 census, Statistics Austria.
  24. ^ Catholic Church of Austria, Statistics . Retrieved February 12, 2017.
  25. ↑ Number of believers of religions in Austria , The Statistics Portal, last seen on December 7, 2016.
  26. ↑ The number of Muslims in Austria is growing rapidly
  27. ↑ Ednan Aslan, Jonas Kolb, Erol Yildiz: Muslim Diversity. A compass for everyday religious practice in Austria, Springer VS, 2017
  28. ^ The Largest Atheist / Agnostic Populations. (No longer available online.) 2005, archived from the original on August 22, 2009 ; accessed on August 23, 2009 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.adherents.com

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