Friday, November 13, 2009

Demography in the Balkans:A birth dearth

As usual, a very good article from The Economist. Slavic population in Serbia and Macedonia declining at an Alarming rate, but I was also very shocked by dramatic drop of birthrate in Kosovo from 3.6 in 1990 to 2.2 now. Albania will grow by a mere 100K in 2050 and Serbia will shrink by 1.2mil to 6mil. They didn't dare publish any prediction for Albs and Slavs in Macedonia...........

From The Economist

The tricky politics of population in the former Yugoslavia

OUTSIDE a hospital in Belgrade, two parking spots are reserved for parents with babies. A placard shows a stork delivering a baby that is then driven off in a car. What is telling is that there are only two spaces. Serbia’s population is shrinking.

Demography is causing alarm in many Balkan countries. In Bosnia and Kosovo, the issue can be fundamental. In Macedonia, a bid by the government to give financial aid to encourage (low-birth) Macedonians to have more children but to exclude (high-birth) Albanians was struck down by the constitutional court in April.

Goran Penev, a Serbian demographer, says his country has 7.2m people (excluding Kosovo). But Serbia has one of the oldest populations in Europe and a low fertility rate, so the population is shrinking by 30,000 a year. This is not because Serbs are becoming rich and want smaller families. Rather, the war years and ensuing economic hardship have knocked the stuffing out of Slavs across former Yugoslavia, leading to fewer children, lots of emigration and high abortion rates.

Mr Penev fears that, at worst, Serbia’s population could shrink by mid-century to only 6m. The population of Croatia, now 4.4m, is also shrinking, if not so drastically. As in Spain and Italy, the influence of the Catholic church has collapsed. Regions inhabited by Serbs who fled in 1995 remain sparsely populated. Plans to repopulate them with ethnic Croats from other countries have largely failed. Similarly, Serbs who saw demographic salvation in the hundreds of thousands of Serbs flooding in from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo in the 1990s have been disappointed.

In Bosnia, demography is high politics. In the last Yugoslav census in 1991, Bosnia had a population of 4.3m. Now it is estimated at only 3.8m, thanks to emigration and some 100,000 war dead. But nobody really knows, and time is running out to prepare a census in 2011. In October Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Croats voted down legislation to get ready for the census. Milorad Dodik, prime minister of the Republika Srpska, the Serb bit of Bosnia, says he will accept a census only if people are asked about their ethnicity. Bosniak leaders fear that Mr Dodik wants to show how few non-Serbs live in Republika Srpska, giving him more reason to ask why a Bosnian state exists.

In Kosovo, as in Bosnia, demography is war by other means. Ethnic Albanians boycotted the 1991 census. A 2006 estimate put the number of people in Kosovo at 2.1m, just over 90% of them Albanian Kosovars. Yet Mimoza Dushi, a demographer, reckons there are now 2.5m people in Kosovo. The implications could be huge. Kosovo gave its minority Serbs big concessions to secure Western recognition, but most Serbs still refuse to participate in its institutions. Oliver Ivanovic, a Serbian government official who deals with Kosovo, believes there are no more than 115,000 Serbs there. Some Kosovars may wonder why so few still merit such special treatment. Mr Ivanovic says Kosovo’s Serbs will not take part in the 2011 census. It would be easy to manipulate, he says, adding that there are actually only 1.7m Albanians in Kosovo.

Kosovar fertility is dropping, too. Ms Dushi believes the rate is 2.2, just above the level needed for a stable population. In 1950, she says, it was 7.8; as late as 1990, it was still 3.6. Even more dramatic is the collapse of fertility in Albania itself, from 2.0 in 2000 to 1.33 in 2007. In 1999 Albania’s population was 3.3m; by 2008 it had fallen to 3.1m (though it will rise by 2050). This is not because Albanians are having fewer children, but because so many women of child-bearing age have emigrated. So much for all those Balkan storks.


Kirsten said...


Too bad that those nations which need to be populated cannot do so while those which are overpopulated keep increasing in number.

posicionamiento web buscadores said...

In my opinion everybody must go through it.

girls escort milano said...

This won't really have success, I feel like this.

sports handicapping software said...


peakoilscotland said...
