To What Extent do Neighbouring Populations Affect Local Population Growth Over Time?

This study covers a period when society changed from a pre-industrial agricultural society to a postindustrial service-producing society. Parallel with this social transformation, major population changes took place. In this study, we analyse to what extent local population change is affected by neighbouring populations. To do this, we focused on the last 190 years of local population change that redistributed population in Sweden. We used literature to identify several different processes in the population redistribution. The different processes implied different spatial dependencies between local population change and the surrounding populations. The analysis is based on an unchanged historical parish division, and we used an index of local spatial correlation to describe different types of spatial dependencies that influenced the redistribution of the population. To control inherent time dependencies, we introduced a non-separable spatial-temporal correlation model into the analysis of population redistribution. Hereby, several different spatial dependencies could be simultaneously observed over time. The main conclusions are that while local population changes have been highly dependent on neighbouring populations in the 19th century, this spatial dependence became insignificant already when two parishes are separated by 5km in the late 20th century. It is argued that the only process that significantly redistributed the population at the end of the 20th century is the immigration to Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]