It's worse than demographers predicted. Serbia: 862,000 inhabitants less than in 2011

It's worse than demographers predicted. Serbia: 862,000 inhabitants less than in 2011

The obtained numbers, as Blic writes, showed how much the population in our country has changed, or rather "thinned out", in ten years.

As confirmed two days ago by the Republic Institute of Statistics, in the next seven days the census will be extended in Vojvodina, Pančevo, Novi Sad and Subotica, while, when it comes to central Serbia, the census will last longer than planned in Valjevo, Užice, Šabac and in certain Belgrade municipalities, such as Mladenovac and Zvezdara, where in the past month not all citizens managed to register.

However, while in some municipalities we cannot expect the data from the census for another four weeks, three cities in Serbia have already announced the results, namely Pirot, Leskovac and Vranje, and confirmed the predictions of certain demographers that in our country by slightly more than 10 years, that is, from the census conducted in 2011 until today, the number of our population has drastically decreased by more than 10 percent.

Thus, according to the recently completed census, 125,876 inhabitants currently live in Leskovac, while according to the census of ten years ago, 144,206 citizens lived there, which shows that now there are as many as 18,330 fewer inhabitants, i.e., a noticeable drop of as much as 12.7 percent.

The population census was completed successfully and on time in the territory of the town of Pirot, where a total of 50,099 persons were enumerated, also less than in 2011 when 57,911 persons lived in that town, so a 13.5 percent decrease in the number of inhabitants was observed in this Serbian town, the results published so far show.

Another Serbian city that managed to collect data from all its citizens as part of the population census from October 1 to 31 is Vranje, where, as stated by the head of the City Administration, Dušan Aritanović, a total of 74,274 inhabitants and 37,214 apartments were registered, which is more than 99 percent of what was planned, he pointed out.

Only eleven years ago, that is, based on the 2011 population census, Vranje had significantly more inhabitants - 83,524, so this city also recorded a more negative result, i.e. a drop in population by 10.2 percent.

If we were to add up these three, otherwise larger Serbian cities, they together have 12.3 percent fewer inhabitants than in the 2011 census when it comes to the area of ​​their territory.

Demographers themselves predicted that the census from October this year will show that there are fewer and fewer of us, before the very beginning of the inhabitants' survey, so demographer from the Institute of Social Sciences Ivan Marinković told Tanjug that today all estimates show how many of us there will be in the upcoming census - 700,000 less than in 2011.

As Marinković explained at the time, it cannot be expected that even with an increase in the birth rate, the demographic picture will change significantly.

"The reason is the broken age structure in which there are fewer and fewer women entering the reproductive period, so the absolute numbers will continue to fall. Fewer and fewer children will be born. There can be oscillations on an annual level, one or two years to some stagnation, but the trend is clear", warned Marinković at the time.

However, if, on the basis of the results so far from the mentioned three cities, that projection is applied to the whole of Serbia, and if we were to cross out 12 percent of the number of 7,186,862 that were officially included in the 2011 census, we would have 862,000 fewer inhabitants in the new census or the total of 6,320,000 inhabitants, which would show that the situation is even worse than demographers predicted.