Romania’s resident population keeps shrinking, official statistics say

The resident population of Romania kept shrinking last year, reaching 19.038 million people on January 1, 2022, according to the latest data from the National Statistics Institute (INS). The figure is 163,600 lower than the one reported at the beginning of 2021.

The leading cause of this drop is the negative natural growth, as the number of people who died in 2021 was 156,000 higher than that of newborns.

Moreover, Romania continues to be a country of emigration, this also being a top cause of the country’s population decline. “The balance of international migration in 2021 was negative, with the number of emigrants exceeding the number of immigrants by a little over 16,000 people,” reads the INS report.

During 2021, men emigrated in a higher proportion than women (50.2%). The situation was similar in the case of immigrants - men were the majority (54.7%).

Also on a negative note, the demographic ageing deepened in Romania last year. According to the same source, the ratio of older people (65 and over) to children (0-14 years) reached 123.6 to 100. The gap between the senior population aged over 65 and the young residents aged 0-14 reached 709,000 people (3.70 million compared to 2.99 million), up from 678,000 people on January 1, 2021.

At the same time, the share of the population aged 0-14 in the total population stagnated at 15.8%, while that of the population aged 65 and over registered an increase of 0.2 percentage points (from 19.3% in 2021 to 19.5% on January 1, 2022).

At the beginning of 2022, 10.281 million people lived in urban areas in Romania, representing more than half of the country’s total resident population. The figure is similar to the one reported the year before.

According to a recent Eurostat report, Romania had one of the largest population declines in Europe between January 1, 2021, and 2022.

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