Trend Shrinkage in peripheral regions despite national growth

Summary

The report points out that even if the Netherlands as a whole keeps growing, regional patterns may diverge. The national welfare and living-environment outlook (WLO) expects regions along the edges of the country in particular to lose population through autonomous developments alone. At the European level, people are moving away above all from Eastern European countries and rural areas, while labour, knowledge and study migration concentrates on economic clusters and metropolitan regions. Fewer young people leads to falling pupil numbers in areas hardly touched by immigration, which could force schools to close or merge. The report suggests that more training and retraining for workers and returners to the labour market could reverse this trend.