Why Is Bulgaria’s Population Falling Off a Cliff?
Yesterday, I saw this on Twitter:
I mean it’s like BBC was just writing headlines designed to goad me on.
So let’s start with a simple, easy-peasy 316 year population time series for Bulgaria.
Population rose, fairly rapidly, with some fits and starts around major wars and some parts of the Ottoman period, from 1700 to the late 1980s. Then after communism fell, population began to decline precipitously. For the future, the UN projects that population in 2100 will be somwhere between 2.8 million and 5 million people. If the lower forecast comes true (implying continuing low birth rates), population stability will probably be reached at about 2 million Bulgarians.
This is monumental. Here’s an indexed population graph of the Baltics, former Yugoslavia, former Czechoslovakia, Albania, Romania, Hungary, and Poland, versus just Bulgaria, with median forecasts shown, to give you an idea of the extremity of Bulgaria’s population collapse.
While many parts of southern and eastern Europe have seen population declines since the fall of communism, Bulgaria’s decline has been unusually severe, and is forecast to continue to be so. Whereas the whole of the region can probably expect to bottom out at less than 50% population loss, it seems plausible Bulgaria will approach 2/3 population loss before stopping its decline.
So what’s behind this decline? Well, here’s the total fertility rate in Bulgaria:
As you can see, it’s low, even on the low side for Eastern European standards. But to be honest, while low fertility is definitely a big contributing factor, it alone cannot explain Bulgaria’s terrible growth performance. Many countries growing faster (or shrinking slower) than Bulgaria have lower fertility rates, such as Portugal, Italy, Spain, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Croatia. So while low fertility definitely creates some headwinds, it cannot be blamed alone for Bulgaria’s striking collapse.
Let’s look at the other side of natural increase: deaths. There’s no standardized death indicator life TFR… so let’s make one. I’ll take age-specific crude death rates and sum up a “Total Mortality Rate.” It’s meaningless, but it does help us see the age-composition-adjusted mortality-prone-ness across years or countries.
And it turns out Bulgarian age-adjusted mortality is, if anything, slightly lower than many other Eastern European countries. Gosh. That’s weird. Now, Bulgaria’s population is, on the whole quite old, so even low age-adjusted mortality can mean fairly high total death rates. Here are crude death rates:
Okay, so Bulgaria has very high crude death rates. But think through this one. Elevated crude death rates alongside relatively low age-adjusted death rates suggest that Bulgaria has an older population. But why is the population older? Partly low fertility, but we already showed that fertility is not that low. Well, one reason the population may be older is because Bulgarian mortality has historically been particularly low for middle-aged people. That is, Bulgaria managed to score anomolously fast growth 30 years ago by keeping its people alive longer, but, in the end, all mortal flesh must fail, and so Bulgaria’s demographic bill is coming due. Population increase through lifespan extension creates accelerated population collapse when natural limits are finally met as delayed mortality becomes clustered near that natural limit of life.
But that’s not the only force at work. Migration, as you might have guessed, matters too.
The above chart shows net migration from 1990–2015, cumulative, divided by 1990 population. In other words, how much change in population can be explained simply by the direct impact of migration? As you can see, Bulgaria has lost a substantial amount of people. It’s not the most severe, but many more severely-losing places either had a major war, or are much smaller.
Adding these up, we can adjust the post-1990 population histories of Bulgaria vs. the Peer Region I made earlier. This won’t account for the additional fertility of counterfactual stayers, but helps show at least the static impact.
Both Bulgaria and the wider region have higher populations under a no-migration counterfactual, but Bulgaria gains more. It still experiences more than 10% population loss, but that’s only about half of what it actually experienced. And if we presume that migration is age-biased (as in fact it is in Bulgaria), then we may rightly expect that this more negative migration also pushes up crude death rates (possibly even age-adjusted death rates) while reducing crude birth rates (again, possibly even total fertility rates, depending on how selection pressures operate). So Bulgaria could be doing even better without migration.
The Bulgarians know these things. And they don’t care.
Encouraging return for Bulgarians is all well and good, but there are only about 1.2 million Bulgarians living outside of Bulgaria. Even if 100% of them returned to Bulgaria, which, spoiler, is never gonna happen, Bulgaria still wouldn’t regain its maximum population. And the reality is that while population decline continues, there’s not a lot of impetus for Bulgarians elsewhere to return home.
So what about fertility incentives? I’ve written about Armenia’s efforts on that front before. The truth is, these measures are almost always too little, too late. The only policy I know of that I’m convinced can be rigorously demonstrated to boost fertility while still being palatable to western, liberal democracies are large, earnings-potential-adjusted cash payouts to moms alongside workforce return protections. But such programs are very expensive. And even then, they only boost lifetime fertility if maintained for many years.
But suppose for a moment that Bulgaria actually did boost fertility. It probably wouldn’t do them any good. They’re part of a free labor mobility area with the EU, and every other economy around them is facing similar demographic decline. Any new laborer born into Bulgaria will face steep demands for them elsewhere, in richer countries. It’s highly likely that any gains made on the fertility front would simply be lost on the migration front.
The only real path for growth available to Bulgaria is large-scale immigration: which they categorically oppose. That being the case, Bulgaria’s demographic future is easy to predict: continued collapse.
Check out my Podcast about the history of American migration.
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I’m a native of Wilmore, Kentucky, a graduate of Transylvania University, and also the George Washington University’s Elliott School. My real job is as an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, where I analyze and forecast cotton market conditions. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research.
