Romania’s population shrinking, aging: Census

Bucharest: Romania’s population continues to decline and the only population group that is increasing in size is the elderly, preliminary census data published by the National Institute of Statistics (INS) showed.

The country’s current population is 19.05 million, 1.1 million less than in the previous census taken in 2011, Xinhua news agency reported.

Of the total population, 9.8 million were female, accounting for 51.5 per cent, the INS said on Friday, adding that 9.941 million people, or 52.2 per cent of the total population, lived in urban areas.

The country’s demographic aging index dropped to 121.2 elderly people per 100 young people compared to 101.8 in the previous census.

The share of the population aged 65 years and above in the total population increased by nearly half a million people, or 3.5 percentage points, from 16.1 per cent in 2011 to 19.6 per cent in 2021.

Information on ethnicity was available for 16.5 million people out of the total of 19.05 million people. Of them, 89.3 per cent identified themselves as Romanian, 6 per cent as ethnic Hungarian and 3.4 per cent as Roma.

Other ethnic groups for which more than 20,000 people were registered are: Ukrainians (45,800 people), Germans (22,900 people) and Turks (20,900 people).

The country’s active population is 8.185 million people, consisting of 7.689 million employed and 496,100 unemployed people, according to the 2021 census, which was the 13th in Romania’s history and the first carried out entirely through a digital platform.

(IANS)