Romania reached peak population in the early 1990s, with a bit over 23 million people living in the country. However, the latest census from 2021 reveals a dramatic drop, with just over 19 million Romanians remaining.
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You can read dig through the official data here (in Romanian language). But the conclusion is the same: Romania’s population declines at alarming rates.
And the reality might be even worse, with a faster decline than the official numbers show – especially since there might be a bit of a snowball effect here, with the death/birth ratio potentially getting worse and worse.
I just read a news article about the latest numbers from the National Institute of Statistics. In May, the number of child births in the country was 11,500 only – a 3% decline compared to the previous month and a whooping 16% decline compared to last year.
Doing a bit more math, this means that just under 9 children were born in Romania per county, per day, throughout the month of May. The numbers seem (and are) really low!
That is confirmed by the number of deaths – 19,550 in the same month (so 1.7x higher than the number of births). In other words, Romania is recording a huge decline in population.
And, at least for now, things don’t seem to be about to change. Societal shifts, both in Romania and globally, have seen marriages become less common, and even among those who do marry, having children is often not a priority.
What does this massive population decline mean for Romania?
In the short term, I think that the effects are not yet catastrophic. Although some cities and especially rural areas are starting to appear deserted – such as Drobeta Turnu Severin, my hometown – we recently moved back here and it’s scary how empty it looks.
Things are still running as they should and generally, property prices are exploding, which I consider a paradox. Especially if we consider the long-term implications and potential drops when there won’t be enough people to live in the said houses.
A walk down the streets of the village we have a house in shows plenty of empty houses. And their number increases constantly. You can easily see that most people in the villages are older, with just a few children left behind by those who immigrated to work in Western countries.
This is another problem Romania is facing, which is increasing the effects of the population’s decline: we still have huge numbers of Romanians emigrating to other countries. This exodus has led to a notable shortage of workers in various industries.
To address this labor shortfall, Romania has been importing workers from poorer East Asian countries. However, this measure is unlikely to reverse the overall population decline, which I believe will only accelerate in the coming years.
You can look at this from a different angle, too. My wife, for instance, argues that the world is still overpopulated, so a slight “correction” might not be entirely negative.
What do you think, though? Should we be concerned about Romania’s population decline and its potential disruptions? Personally, I find the trend disconcerting and troubling to say the least.
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I hope this may lead to more visa opportunities for those of us who’d like to move to Romania! I’d love to move there on a retirement visa, but nothing exists so far. Maybe this will nudge them a bit.
Ever since starting this blog, some 10 years ago, I have said that they should introduce a retirement visa of sorts – or make it easier for retirees to retire here.
Clearly, the Romanians who have left Romania felt they had no opportunities to prosper there. Romania has not attracted enough investment from west European countries which would have brought factories and jobs to Romania. My impression is that the Romanian government just doesn’t inspire confidence among western economic decisionmakers. Corruption is still a big issue after all these years and the government seems to be in the firm grip of a PNL/PSD “mafia” which also controls the Constitutional Court and the Romanian media landscape. Japan is also suffering from population decline. The root cause here is that large corporations call the shots and they prioritize low wages and overworking their employees. They are heavily invested in the exportation of their goods and don’t care about the domestic market. The young Japanese have no confidence in their future and retreat into mangas and computer games. The government makes sounds like they are concerned about the declining and aging population, but then they do whatever the large corporations tell them to.
Japan was the country I was thinking about when talking about declining population. I agree that the situations are different (the cause of the population decline).
Things are much better in Romania than they were a couple of decades ago, but still not perfect. There has been an artificial increase in wages, which is not sustainable, and they have resulted in higher taxes – with more hikes being expected next year, after the elections. So things look much better on paper than in reality, although, as I said, there has been nice growth over the past decade or so.
On the subject of the world being overpopulated, it was stunning for me to learn how much of world agriculture land is dedicated to feeding livestock. Fully 80% of all agricultural land is used to feed livestock like cows, pigs, and chickens. Only 16% of agricultural land directly feeds humans and the other 4% is used for non-food production of things like biofuels and cotton. Of the total global calories produced by world agriculture, we humans derive 83% of our calories from that 16% of agricultural land. The other 17% of our calories comes from eating livestock products. So we are using 80% of all agricultural land to provide 17% of our calories. That is stupid. To produce 100% of our calories from non-livestock sources would only require slightly increasing that 16% of agricultural land devoted to human consumption. The rest of that land, the 80% now being used to feed animals minus any increase devoted to human consumption, could largely be restored to more biodiverse landscapes like forests and prairies. The nonstop belching of greenhouse gases by livestock, which is a more significant source of these gases than all our transportation systems combined, would stop. Our health would improve dramatically because of healthier plant-based diets. World fresh water resources, whose use follows similar patterns to livestock/human use of agricultural land, would be less burdened. Last, but not least, our families would save a lot of money by not buying meat, dairy, and egg products. So clearly there is more than sufficient agricultural capacity to support a much larger world population if only we turn away from feeding livestock instead of people. Will we do that? Probably not. We will merrily eat our meat while others starve and while climate change creates climate refugees who will knock at our doors and we will demand they be deported. Yes, I am vegan.
Thanks for sharing this, Stuart! I wasn’t aware of how much land is dedicated to raising livestock. You are correct – things would look a lot different if we could change our way of living, even a bit.
Instead, we have the big corporations (it always seems we end up talking about them) that make the important decisions – and they decide to increase their profits constantly.