It is the official journal of the European Society of Population Economics and is published by Springer Science+Business Media in collaboration with POP at UNU-MERIT and the Global Labor Organization.

[1] It was established in 1987 by Klaus F. Zimmermann (UNU-MERIT), who remains the editor-in-chief.

[1] The journal is abstracted and indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index, Scopus, EconLit, CAB International, CAB Abstracts, and the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences.

[4] Since 1995, the journal awards the "Kuznets Prize", named after the 1971 Nobel Prize laureate Simon Kuznets, a pioneer in populations economics, for the best article published in the journal.

[5] The editors judge the best papers, originally for a three-year period and since 2014 annually.