The Latest Demographic Developments

The latest data published by the National Institute of Statistics has confirmed the recent concerns regarding the Romanian populations structure and dynamics.

Bogdan Matei, 12.01.2016, 13:06

The National Institute of Statistics
(INS) has confirmed the warning signal it issued last December after the
publication of a yearly report on Romania’s demographic dynamics comprising
data on the number and the structure of population as well as on its natural
and migratory displacement. On Monday the INS announced that 3000 less
children had been born in November than in October, while 520 more dead had been reported. All in all, the natural
growth was on a negative trend and the population decreased by more than 7000
people in a single month.

The number of children within a family has also
diminished as more and more women nowadays decide to have children when they
are older, the number of marriages has decreased, while divorces are on the
rise. The process of depopulation has stepped up in the past 25 years after the
fall of the communist dictatorship, being triggered by the opening of borders,
which eased migration; about three million Romanians are currently living
abroad. Although the migration phenomenon has lately diminished, it made a
significant contribution to depopulation because most of the migrants were
people with ages between 25 and 34, which heavily bore on the birth rate. After
1989 the number of Romanians dropped from 23.2 million to 19.9, completely
reversing the situation back in the communist time when an abortion ban led to
a demographic growth of 26%.

Of course the INS president Tudor Andrei
disapproves of the brutal intrusion of the communist state into the family
life, explaining that such rapid effects could be obtained only in totalitarian
systems. Romania’s modernization process also entails a series of negative
demographic phenomena the Western societies already dealt with in the past
decades. However, according to Tudor Andrei, there are western countries, like
France for instance, which has seen a population growth of 13% in the past 25
years. The INS president looks into the causes that made possible such a growth
rate.

Tudor Andrei: There are fiscal measures directly targeting people with
children: building more kindergartens and other facilities in which children
can get education at the same time allowing parents to have an active life
shortly after the birth of a child; there is also a third category of measures
such as tax exempton applying to certain categories of families.

In turn, the director of the Centre for
Demographic Research of the Romanian Academy, Vasile Ghetau said that a survey
should be conducted among young people in order to find out why an increasing
number of couples did not want children anymore and what might convince them to
reconsider their decision.