Zoea Baltag, 105-year-old, receives the second shot of COVID-19 vaccine at a hospital in Bucharest, Romania, March 28, 2021. (Photo by Cristian Cristel/Xinhua)
The country's current population is 19.05 million, 1.1 million less than in the previous census taken in 2011. Nearly 20 percent of the population is aged 65 years and over.
BUCHAREST, Dec. 30 (Xinhua) -- Romania's population continues to decline and the only population group that is increasing in size is the elderly, preliminary census data published by the National Institute of Statistics (INS) showed on Friday.
The country's current population is 19.05 million, 1.1 million less than in the previous census taken in 2011.
Of the total population, 9.8 million were female, accounting for 51.5 percent, the INS said, adding that 9.941 million people, or 52.2 percent of the total population, lived in urban areas.
Children play during an event marking International Children's Day in Bucharest, Romania, on June 1, 2022. (Photo by Cristian Cristel/Xinhua)
The country's demographic aging index dropped to 121.2 elderly people per 100 young people compared to 101.8 in the previous census.
The share of the population aged 65 and over in the total population increased by almost half a million people, or 3.5 percentage points, from 16.1 percent in 2011 to 19.6 percent in 2021.
Information on ethnicity was available for 16.5 million people out of the total of 19.05 million people. Of them, 89.3 percent identified themselves as Romanian, 6 percent as ethnic Hungarian and 3.4 percent as Roma.
A couple take a walk at a park in Bucharest, Romania, Jan. 1, 2022. (Photo by Gabriel Petrescu/Xinhua)
Other ethnic groups for which more than 20,000 people were registered are: Ukrainians (45,800 people), Germans (22,900 people) and Turks (20,900 people).
The country's active population is 8.185 million people, consisting of 7.689 million employed and 496,100 unemployed people, according to the 2021 census, which was the 13th in Romania's history and the first carried out entirely through a digital platform.■
