The "average expected scenario" of the National Statistical Institute in Serbia indicates that in 30 years the population in the country will be 1.5 million less.
The southern and eastern regions of the country /where there is a Bulgarian population, ed./ will be most affected by depopulation, losing a third of their population. Unsurprisingly, Belgrade will be the least affected region. The capital and the four cities of Novi Sad, Novi Pazar, Kragujevac and Nis will be home to half of the country's total population, although a city such as Nis in the south of the country will lose 14% of its current population of 250,000 at the same time. In the northern part of the country, Vojvodina will lose a quarter of its population, emphasizes Danas.
The main reasons for the demographic decline are the low birth rate with a negative natural balance of 86 births for every 100 deaths per year and negative net migration, i.e. the outflow of the population to work and live abroad. Two exceptions to the rule: Preševo and Bujanovac, two predominantly Albanian cities in southern Serbia, will see population increases of around 10%.
Novica Tonchev, minister without portfolio responsible for improving the development of underdeveloped municipalities, assures us that the Serbian government is making efforts to improve living conditions in the most affected regions.
But Mladen Jovanovic, an independent expert on decentralization and regionalization and former director of the National Coalition for Decentralization, argued that southern and eastern Serbia were politically and economically "discriminated against" by the central state. According to him, these regions have become a reservoir of skilled labor for Belgrade and increasingly for Novi Sad, where most educated people move. And these regions are seen as a "source of cheap labor", specifically for physical jobs.
"It is as if the Serbian government has set the border of neoliberal colonialism south of the Sava and Danube rivers, where bad foreign investment, exploitation of natural resources and environmental problems are most severe," the expert explains. "As long as the citizens of the south are waiting for Belgrade to save them, it will not happen. Southern Serbia can only be developed by the people who live there."
The National Statistical Institute points out that the turning point in this demographic decline occurred in 1991: "Until then, the number of inhabitants of Serbia was increasing, mainly due to positive natural growth. But as a result of unfavorable economic and social changes in the 1990s, during the wars in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, economic sanctions and the influx of refugees and internally displaced persons, the number of inhabitants began to decrease. From then until 2022, the date of the last census, the downward trend continued with no end in sight. I BGNES
