Since young adults tend to move from rural to urban regions, whereas older adults move from urban to rural regions, we may expect to see increasing differences in population ageing across urban and rural regions. This paper examines whether trends in population ageing across urban and rural NUTS-2 regions of the EU-27 have diverged over the period 2003–13. We use the methodological approach of convergence analysis, quite recently brought to demography from the field of economic research. Unlike classical beta and sigma approaches to convergence, we focus not on any single summary statistic of convergence, but rather analyse the whole cumulative distribution of regions. Such an approach helps to identify which specific group of regions is responsible for the major changes. Our results suggest that, despite expectations, there was no divergence in age structures between urban and rural regions; rather, divergence happened within each of the groups of regions.

由于年轻人倾向于从农村地区迁移到城市地区，而老年人则从城市地区迁移到农村地区，我们可能会看到城市和农村地区人口老龄化的差异越来越大。本文研究了 2003-13 年期间，欧盟 27 国的城乡 NUTS-2 地区的人口老龄化趋势是否存在分歧。我们使用最近从经济研究领域引入人口学的收敛分析方法论方法。与经典的 beta 和 sigma 收敛方法不同，我们不关注任何单一的收敛汇总统计，而是分析区域的整个累积分布。这种方法有助于确定哪些特定的区域组对主要变化负责。我们的结果表明，尽管有预期，城乡年龄结构无差异；相反，每个区域组内都出现了分歧。