ヨーロッパの国境を越えた人口移動と過疎化・少子化・高齢化の問題−ルーマニア・ルプサヌ村の例
Poverty drives central Europe's great exodus
By Ioana Patran and Sam Cage | Thu Mar 29, 2012 4:20am EDT
LUPSANU, Romania (Reuters) - Maria Ene's traditional white house on a muddy, unnamed Romanian street doesn't have running water, but it does have two satellite dishes sprouting from its fence.
Three of Ene's five children have moved to Spain. It's not that far, but with everyone feeling the pinch of Europe's economic downturn, she sees them once a year at most, and needs to feel connected.
"I saw them on the Internet," said Ene, 69, who lives in the small village of Lupsanu, 75 km east of Bucharest.
"A grandson of mine showed them to me as I felt at one point I could not go on," she said, with tears in her eyes.
"It's hard there for them, but what would they do here? There at least they have a job."
More than 20 years after the fall of communism, the wealth gap between the east and west of Europe persists, and countries from the Black Sea to the Baltic are shedding people at an alarming rate.
While membership in the European Union has brought prosperity to many, it has also made it easier to emigrate, drawing young people out of the east, especially rural areas, and leaving behind an ever older and poorer population.
Romania, the EU's second-poorest member with an average monthly wage of $450, is one of the worst affected, with a 12 percent population drop in a decade, according to census data.
At the other end of the continent, the census in Latvia - a Baltic state which was seen as a great success story until the current financial crisis sent its economy into freefall - showed it lost 13 percent of its people, mostly to emigration.
Both countries have had to impose harsh austerity programs under the terms of International Monetary Fund-led bailouts.
The population in comparatively richer countries like the Czech Republic and Poland has remained steady thanks to returning emigrants and others arriving from less well-off states in the region.
But to the south, in the Balkans, and in the northern Baltic states, the picture is grim. Censuses conducted across the continent in 2011 showed Lithuania has lost 12 percent of its population in a decade, Bulgaria 7 percent and Serbia, still outside the EU, 5 percent. Hungary had 10.4 million people just after the 1989 fall of communism, but statistics office data show that slipped below 10 million last year.
Wealthy Germany's population, by contrast, rose last year for the first time since 2002 thanks to immigration from the EU's new members, despite the fact deaths were projected to exceed births, according to its statistics office.
People who opt to leave the poorer parts of Europe do not sense there will be an improvement in living standards any time soon.
"Ninety percent of Romanians do not believe there is going to be a better future in Romania," said Victor Ponta, who leads Romania's leftist opposition and is favorite to be the next prime minister after a November election.
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