Rumāņi -30% līdz 2050


In 1990, the country’s population peaked at 23.2 million but at the beginning of 2019 it was 19.4 million. So, since the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, the country’s resident population has declined by 16.4 per cent or 3.8 million people.

And the projections do not look good: according to the Romanian National Institute of Statistics, by 2050 the country’s population could shrink to 15 million or 35 per cent less than in 1990. (A UN projection is less gloomy, foreseeing population at 16.39 million in 2050, a fall of just over 30 per cent.)

During the Ceausescu era, few Romanians could leave the country, with two distinct exceptions: Jews and ethnic Germans. Large numbers of them were in effect ransomed by Israel and West Germany which, under various guises, bought exit visas for them.

By 1990, there were relatively few Jews left and some 200,000 of the remaining ethnic Germans then left rapidly for Germany.

[S]ome one million to 1.2 million left for Italy while another million went to Spain.

The situation was so dramatic, he says, that virtually whole towns in the hardest-affected regions emptied.

This period came to an end because of the economic crisis that hit Italy and Spain hard and because Romania joined the EU at the beginning of 2007.

Since then, says Anghel, approximately one million have left.

Initially nine of the then 26 EU countries imposed transitional labour restrictions but these have since been lifted.

Britain lifted restrictions in 2014, for example, leading to a huge leap in the country’s Romanian population, which hit 415,000 in 2018 compared with 19,000 in 2007.

According to the World Bank, 20.6 per cent of the country’s working age population was abroad in 2017.

https://balkaninsight.com/2019/11/28/romanias-demographic-tailspin-heralds-social-change/