Bulgaria is facing a continued population decline that is increasingly taking on a geographic dimension, with entire areas of the country losing residents and developing what demographers describe as “demographic deserts.”
Assoc. Prof. Spas Tashev, a demographer at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Population and Human Research, said the country is experiencing two parallel demographic trends: an overall decline in population and an increasingly uneven distribution of people across its territory.
“Bulgaria is becoming a country with a continuously decreasing population, while at the same time this decreasing population has clearly expressed spatial dimensions, with the population literally disappearing from entire territories of the country,” Tashev told Bulgarian National Radio.
He said some demographers use the term “demographic desert” for areas with fewer than 10 people per square kilometer. While mountainous and semi-mountainous areas have traditionally had lower population densities, such extreme depopulation creates problems well beyond demographics.
According to Tashev, the consequences are visible in the social and economic spheres, as well as in infrastructure and national security. “There, in practice, the state does not have full sovereignty,” he said, referring to areas where very few people remain.
