The population, household and apartment census will begin on October 1 and will last for one month. In the last census of 2011, Serbia had 7,186,862 inhabitants.
What is the demographic trend and whether UNICEF’s assessment that we are among the five oldest nations in Europe is correct will be known already on the last day of November, when the Bureau of Statistics will announce the preliminary results of this year’s census.
Ivan Marinković, a demographer, told RTS that Serbia is a country of old people and that after the census he expects the population to drop by as much as 700,000.
“I expect a large drop in the number of inhabitants, at least 500,000 will be less based on the data of vital statistics, between births and deaths, and when we get the data we will see how much external migration was. I expect a drop of 700,000 inhabitants,” Marinković said.
What can be positive, says Marinković, is that there will be a slightly better educational structure, that computer literacy will be at a higher level and that certain economic parameters will probably be better.
He points out that democratic trends were established several decades ago, and that we cannot expect positive things.
“We are aging from the bottom up, because fewer and fewer children are born every year, each generation is smaller in number. We are also aging from the top, we have life extension and what is unknown for now is migration and its selectivity,” Marinković said.
Estimates and expert opinions say, says Marinković, that on an annual level 15,000-20,000 more people leave Serbia than move to it, so we expect a negative migration balance that can be up to 200,000.
“As far as vital statistics are concerned, on an annual basis, starting from 2011, 2012, 2013, we lose about thirty thousand, and in later years this would increase to 40,000. The last two years of the covid pandemic made a huge difference, over 50,000, so even 70,000 was a negative balance, so that way we lost half a million inhabitants,” said Marinković.
“Many villages did not have a demographic future”
He pointed out that the villages are quite demographically disadvantaged.
“The villages were created spontaneously and were not formed according to a plan, so many did not have a demographic future. And when a family moves there and has children, they increase the numbers at that moment of birth, but this is short-term and without any perspective,” says Marinković.
At the beginning of the 1950s, about 160,000 children were born in Serbia, and now about 65,000 are born annually.
“We have a clear trend of declining absolute values, fewer and fewer children are born every year, there may be some deviations, but they are very small. The trend is also such that the generations of women entering the reproductive period, we cannot expect absolute the value of more important changes,” said Marinković.
“We belong to the demographically oldest population in the world, Europe is generally demographically very old, whether we are among the top five or ten depends on which of the indicators we take. We will see after the census if this is so or if we are in an even worse position,” he said. Marinković.
In Serbia, the number of people over 65 has long exceeded the number of children under 15. The data speak of directly related phenomena: more than one million two hundred thousand inhabitants of Serbia are older than 65 years and, on the other hand, the average family with children in Serbia statistically has 1.6 children. The number of inhabitants of Serbia decreases by over thirty thousand every year.
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