While Europe's population is projected to dip by over 10% by the year 2100, the European Union's statistics body Eurostat does not believe that will be the case for Malta, as it projects the country to host a population of over 720,000 people by that time.
Data published by Eurostat on Thursday projects that the EU's population will decline by 11.7% - equivalent to 53 million people - between 2025 and the year 2100.
Malta however bucks the trend: Eurostat's projections, which are based on "assumptions of partial convergence of EU countries' fertility, mortality and migration patterns" projects that the country's population will have increased to 723,710 by 2100.
That is an increase of just over 20% when compared to the country's current population of 574,250 people.
The population predicted for 2100 is not even the peak population that Eurostat projects in the years till then: the statistics body projected that Malta's population in the year 2075 would be 765,928, and then decline slightly from there until 2100.
Malta's population has been at the centre of political debate in recent years: it has grown by over a quarter since 2013, and around 30% of it is made up of non-Maltese individuals.
Critics have called this increase a bi-product of the Labour Government's economic policies and said that it is the primary reason for many of the challenges that the island is currently facing, while the government recently introduced a new Labour Migration Policy to try and bring some control to migration while also introducing tax breaks for parents to encourage more Maltese to have children.
On a continental level, Eurostat said that in 2025, the EU population was estimated at 451.8 million, having resumed its growth trend in 2022, after the COVID-19 pandemic disruption in 2021. Looking ahead, the population is projected to continue to increase over the next 3 years, peaking at 453.3 million in 2029, before gradually declining to 398.8 million by 2100.
Eurostat noted that between 2025 and 2100, the proportion of children, young people, and working-age people in the total EU population is expected to decline. The share of children and young people (aged 0-19) is projected to decrease from 20% to 17%, while the share of working-age people (aged 20-64) is expected to fall from 58% to 50% by 2100.
In contrast, the proportion of older age groups (65 and over) is projected to increase. The share of those aged 65-79 is anticipated to rise from 16% in 2025 to 17% in 2100, whereas the share of those aged 80 and over is expected to increase by 10 percentage points, from 6% to 16%.