Greece also suffered a lot under Italian and German occupation and the civil war. In the 1980s economic development and growth slowed down, and the gap between Greece and its partners in the European Union grew. This is mainly the result of losses in productivity. The government is trying to consolidate public finances in order to meet the Maastricht criteria. Greece has a population of 10 million people and is therefore located in the group of the middle-sized EU countries.
Population growth is moderate due to very low fertility rates.
Greece is now a highly urbanized country, but urbanization is bicephalic, with about half of the country's population living in the two big urban centres. Nevertheless the distances between the different parts of the country are rather small. Most Greeks have two flats, one in a big urban centre and one on the islands or in the countryside. One specific feature of Greece is migration in the two forms of internal migration form the country to the cities and emigration. Until the 80s internal migration was high, as the declining population figures of the mountaineous regions and the islands show.