The topic of this thesis was chosen for two main reasons. The first reason is that this work combines many different social science topics, and the second reason is that I wanted to extend my knowledge of Microsoft Excel, as well as work with statistical data. Demographic indicators are supposed to be constantly improving, so this research aims to determine whether a country's membership in the European Union accelerates the improvement of demographic indicators, and, if so, which ones. I also want to identify similarities and differences between these countries and get acquainted with the advantages and disadvantages of this topic for Slovenia. We will compare the ten countries that joined the European Union together in 2004. We believe that these countries are the most comparable, as they share a similar history and a common European future. Except for Malta and Cyprus, these countries experienced a transition from communism to capitalism and from dictatorship to democracy in the early 1990s. Right after that, they devoted themselves to joining the European Union. Mostly, the following research methods were used: quantitative method, comparative method, and descriptive method. It was found, that there are visible differences between these ten countries and that membership in the European Union alone is not enough to improve demographic indicators. We were able to divide the countries into a group of five winners and a group of five losers. The three hypotheses, however, were rejected. We also discussed the forecast data for 2025 in the tables, so the usefulness of this thesis is that in the future we will be able to compare these data with the actual situation at the time.
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