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| Europe population decline map |
Albania is ranked among the 10 countries that will have the largest population decline in the world by 2050, according to a report by Visual Capitalist, which has processed United Nations data.
Albania's population is expected to shrink by 15.8% by 2050, according to the report, ranking tenth, after Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Moldova, and Japan.
According to the tables of the United Nations, by 2050 the population of Albania is expected to decrease to 2.5 million inhabitants and by the year 2100 it will shrink to 1.1 million inhabitants.
The previous forecasts of the United Nations, in pessimistic scenarios, expected a population decline of up to 860 thousand inhabitants in the year 2100.
Report
Since the mid-1900s, the global population has followed an increasing trajectory, the report says. While most of this growth has been concentrated in China and India, researchers expect the next wave of growth to occur in Africa. As of 2019, for example, the average woman in Niger gives birth to over six children in her lifetime. At the opposite end of this spectrum are a number of countries that appear to be shrinking from a population perspective.
Many of these countries are located in or near Eastern Europe.
The first reason is the birth rate, which according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), has shrunk since the fall of the Soviet Union. Across the region, the average number of children per woman fell from 2.1 in 1988 to 1.2 by 1998.
Birth rates have recovered slightly since then, but not enough to offset deaths and emigration, which refers to citizens leaving their country to live elsewhere.
Eastern Europe saw several waves of immigration following the expansion of the European Union's (EU) borders in 2004 and 2007. PIIE reports that by 2016, 6.3 million Eastern Europeans resided in other EU states.