The European Union’s inhabitants shrank for a second yr working final yr, the bloc’s statistics workplace stated on Monday (Jul 11), because the area reels from over two million deaths from the coronavirus.
Based on Eurostat, the inhabitants of the 27 international locations that make up the bloc fell by near 172,000 from the earlier yr and over 656,000 from January 2020.
“In 2020 and 2021 the optimistic web migration not compensated for the adverse pure change within the EU and, as a consequence, the EU whole inhabitants has been reducing,” it stated, pointing to impacts from the pandemic.
The variety of deaths started outstripping births within the EU a decade in the past, however immigration from exterior the bloc helped offset the hole till the primary yr of the pandemic.
The earlier time the EU had registered a fall in inhabitants was in 2011 – the one different time since 1960 – however this quickly picked up attributable to web migration.
Given the pandemic, an growing old inhabitants and comparatively low fertility charges, Eurostat stated deaths ought to proceed to outstrip births within the coming years.
“Ought to this be the case,” it stated, “the EU’s total inhabitants decline or progress sooner or later is prone to rely largely on the contribution made by web migration”.
Whereas Italy, Poland and Romania recorded the biggest inhabitants falls, greater than half EU member states noticed their populations improve, led by France, the Netherlands and Sweden.
Eurostat counted 446.8 million individuals dwelling contained in the EU at January 2022.