Demographic Security and Sustainable Development in the EU-27 and Ukraine, 2014–2024: A Composite Index and Its Structural Association with Income

Europe faces sustained demographic contraction—sub-replacement fertility and aging—and Ukraine, whose full-scale war triggered Europe’s largest forced-displacement episode, is its sharpest case. We treat demographic security as a measurable state and construct a composite Demographic Security Index from nine indicators across five dimensions (natural change, aging, migration, health, and gender balance), measured identically for the EU-27 and Ukraine, 2014–2024. Construction uses pooled min–max normalization and equal-indicator weighting—so the volatile migration indicator receives one-ninth weight and cannot dominate the composite—with leave-one-out, random-weight, and alternative-scheme sensitivity checks, winsorized migration, and fixed-effects regressions on income. Ukraine ranks 26th–28th during 2014–2021 and reaches the panel’s lowest score, 0.282, in 2022, with the fall concentrated in the migration, gender-balance, and natural-change dimensions. Its limited 2024 uptick to 27th is driven by one projected migration input; removing the migration dimension leaves Ukraine last. Across countries, demographic security and income co-occur strongly (r ≈ 0.81); within countries, the short-run association is weakly negative, shared between the migration and gender-balance channels. Demographic security is thus a structural correlate of the economic dimension of development, not a short-run driver, and crisis-era composites should be read by dimension, not their headline score.