Over 184,000 Romanians left the country in 2014, and most of them were women, according to Tudorel Andrei, president of the National Statistics Institute INS.

“More women emigrated in 2013-2014 than men. Some 55% of the Romanians who left the country in these two years were women. It is a change in the population’s behavior, as things were the other way around in the early 2000s," said the INS president in a press conference.

On the other hand, most of the people who came to Romania as immigrants were men, he added.

A total of 184,603 Romanians emigrated last year, and 142,426 came into the country. Thus, the number of Romanian citizens leaving the country was higher than the number of people coming into the country by some 42,000.

This contributed to Romania's population decline last year, as the country's resident population was 19.86 million, as of January 1, 2015, some 90,000 lower than one year before. The other factor that led to this decrease was the natural decline, as more people died than were born last year.

Romania's population decline accelerated after the country's EU accession in 2007, as over 2 million Romanians left the country to work abroad. As most of them were young people, this also led to a significant decline in the number of births in Romania.

The decline will likely continue and forecasts show that Romania could register the third highest population decline in the world by 2050.

Romania continues to lose its people: the resident population drops to new low

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Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com