Bulgaria empties. Data from the European Commission’s Statistical Office (Eurostat) and the first Bulgarian census in a decade show that the population loss that began in the late 1980s is unstoppable.
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Of the more than 8.9 million inhabitants that the country had in 1988, when it reached its historical maximum, it went down until it reached in mid-2021 to just over 6.5 million, a loss of almost 35 percent.
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In the last decade alone, between the 2011 and 2021 censuses, the loss is equivalent to 11.5 percent of the population, some 844,000 people.
Experts estimate that there are three determining factors to explain this phenomenon. With a squalid birth rate like that of practically all of Europe, Bulgaria has both the highest mortality rate in Europe: 15.5 Bulgarians out of 1,000 die each year.
Added to this relatively high birth rate is one of the highest emigration rates in the Old Continent and a zero immigration rate. Life expectancy in 2019 (reference year because it does not take into account the devastating effects of the pandemic) was 75.10 years. To put a reference in Europe, Spain and Italy have a life expectancy that exceeds 83 years.
Economic development has not served in recent decades as a brake on population decline. When Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007hand in hand with its neighbor Romania and only three years after other Central and Eastern European countries such as Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia or the three small Baltic republics, the country had a per capita income of 4,240 euros.
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Thirteen years later, at the end of 2020 – and despite the economic destruction of the pandemic – that per capita income had more than doubled to 8,840 euros. In that period, wages improved until the monthly minimum wage multiplied almost by four (from 92 to 332 euros) and the average annual wage by more than three (from 2,594 to 7,771).
This economic improvement did not prevent the departure of a considerable part of the Bulgarian population. The latest data handled by the European Commission ensure that el 22 percent of the Bulgarian population lives abroad. It is a rate that exceeds that of most of the nations of the planet and that supposes, in the case of Bulgaria, more than 1.5 million people. Of that million and a half, almost 900,000 are women.
When the country joined the European Union in 2007, that percentage of the population residing abroad, the Bulgarian diaspora, was about 12 percent. When the communist regime fell in 1990, it barely reached 7 percent.
This Bulgarian diaspora is mostly concentrated in a few countries. Almost half (652,900) legally reside in Turkey. They are followed by the Bulgarian communities in Germany (262,462 people), Spain (121,435), the United States (79,415), Greece (71,043), and Italy (62,358).
Bulgaria’s population loss is so fast that it can put the country in a vicious circle. As part of the presentation of last year’s census, one of the experts from the Bulgarian National Institute of Statistics, Magdalena Kostova, spoke about the speed at which “the population is ageing”.
Their data ensures that 23.9 percent of Bulgarians are over 65 years old and only 14 percent are under 18 years old. These numbers make the resident population in Bulgaria one of the oldest in Europe.
The situation in some regions of the country is beginning to be dramatic. Northern Bulgaria, poorer and more rural, bordering Romania, without large cities or tourist attractions to attract foreign visitors, is experiencing a crisis situation.
Some cities in that region lost almost 30 percent of their population in a single decade, from 2011 to 2021. Vidin is ground zero for Bulgarian depopulation, as reflected in this report by the online newspaper Balkan Insight in which, In addition to collecting testimonies from neighbors, it was said that the city had had 162,000 inhabitants in 1985, but that by 2018 it was barely 85,000, practically half.
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The demographic forecasts handled by the European Commission estimate that the country could lose between 1.4 and 1.5 million inhabitants during this decade, to reach 2030 with just five million.
60 percent of Bulgaria’s territory will be a ‘demographic desert’
It would thus have lost almost half of its population in less than half a century, something unprecedented in times of peace. According to a report by experts Georgi Burdarov and Nadezhda Ilieva, whom EL TIEMPO was able to consult, this is the most likely scenario with current demographic trends.
These experts also estimate that 26 percent of the towns in the country will be completely depopulated.
Bulgaria is perhaps the most prominent case, but it is not the only country in the region that suffers from a demographic problem. North Macedonia lost 10 percent of its population in two decades. Since its independence after the warlike collapse of the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia’s population loss was 600,000 inhabitants.
Another of the countries that suffers from this demographic bleeding is also the Balkan Croatia, which in the last decade lost 10 percent of its population. Most of them emigrated to Northern European countries after the country joined the European Union on July 1, 2013.
Albania is another striking case. The small country in the southern Balkans, which for decades lived in isolation because it was officially part of the communist bloc, but was in conflict with the Soviet Union for many years, lost in the last three decades, from the moment its citizens were able to emigrate, 37 percent of its population, equivalent to 1.7 million people.
Bosnia is another example of a region that is depopulating. Partly because of similar problems to its neighbors and partly because of the economic consequences of the post-war period (it was the country of the former Yugoslavia that suffered the most in terms of human casualties and material damage), almost half of Bosnians live outside the country.
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Kosovo, the last independent country to emerge from the Yugoslav debacle, lost between 2007 and 2018 15.4 percent of its population. The projections handled by the Statistical Office of the European Commission show that the emigration suffered by these countries will make them older because when young people of working age emigrate, the average age rises and because those who are left behind, due to age, do not have children .
Romania and Bulgaria will be the first countries in the European Union whose population exceeds 50 years as an average age. By 2050 their populations will be on average eight years older than they are now.
The problem also hurts the economy and triggers public spending while reducing income. This is mainly due to the fact that the older a population is, the more difficult it is for companies to find the workforce necessary to operate optimally, which also migrates in search of better conditions and wages.
This generates less public revenue from taxes and at the same time more public spending on retirement pensions and health, which is used more by older people.
IDAFE MARTIN PEREZ
FOR THE TIME
BRUSSELS
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