This places growing demands on care of the elderly and pension schemes. The average life-expectancy of Finnish women is 78.9 years and of men 70.9. The most common causes of death are cardio-vascular diseases, cancer and respiratory diseases. The 94 towns in Finland have a total of 3.1 million inhabitants, and the inhabitants of rural municipalities are also concentrated in urban centres. In the 1980s and 1990s, migration within Finland has not achieved the proportions of the 1960s and 1970s.
People mainly move within their home municipalities.
Such mobility is no longer as strongly directed away from rural municipalities and towards the towns, particularly in the Helsinki area, as it was three decades ago. A balance has now been achieved. The largest urban municipalities have lost people to surrounding municipalities due to suburbanization. While 48,000 people move annually from rural areas into the urban municipalities, the number of people moving from the towns to the countryside is higher, i.e. 57,000. Thus 'counter-urbanization' has also been observed in Finland during the 1990s.