Romania’s resident population declined by another 122,000 people in 2016, reaching 19.63 million as of January 1, 2017, according to data from the National Statistics Institute (INS).

Romania had a resident population of 19.76 million people at January 1, 2016.

The drop was mainly caused by the increased level of emigration and the demographic decline, the data shows.

Last year, Romania lost slightly over 68,000 people only due to the natural decline (the number of live births minus number of deaths). Meanwhile, emigration was the second biggest cause of the country's population decline.

“The balance of international migration in 2016 was negative, with the number of emigrants exceeding the number of immigrants by over 76,000 people,” reads the INS press release.

The demographic aging also widened last year, the gap between the elderly population aged 65 and over and the young population of 0-14 years reaching 440,000 people, up from 371,000 people at January 1, 2016. There were 3.49 million elderly aged 65 and over in Romania in 2016, and slightly over 3 million young people aged 0-14.

Data shows that the demographic aging index has increased from 112.1 (January 1, 2016) to 114.4 elderly per 100 young people (January 1, 2017).

The share of the population aged 0-14 in the total population increased by only 0.1 percentage points, from 15.5% at January 1, 2016 to 15.6% in 2017. Meanwhile, the share of the elderly population aged 65 and over in the total population went up by 0.4 percentage points, to 17.8% as of January 1, 2017. Thus, the index of demographic dependence increased from 49 (January 1, 2016) to 50 young and elderly per 100 adults (January 1, 2017).

Eurostat data showed that Romania was one of the EU countries with large population decreases last year. With a decrease of -6.2 per 1,000 residents, Romania registered the fifth-largest decline in the EU after Lithuania (-14.2‰), Latvia (-9.6‰), Croatia (-8.7‰), and Bulgaria (-7.3‰).

Irina Marica, irina.marica@romania-insider.com