Serbia has around 150,000 Roma

BELGRADE - Serbia has a total of 147,604 Roma people, making up 2.05 percent of the population, according to a study titled Roma People in Serbia, by Svetlana Radovanovic and Aleksandar Knezevic of the Faculty of Geography in Belgrade.

The study was done based on data from the census conducted by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia in 2011.

According to the census data, the largest number of Roma, 39 percent, live in the southern and eastern Serbia, while only 14 percent of them live in the Sumadija region and in western Serbia.

The average age of the Roma in Serbia is 28 years old, which makes them considerably younger than the rest of the population.

The study does not cover the territory of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo-Metohija, which is under an interim UN administration, as no census has been carried out there.

Data for the municipalities of Presevo and Bujanovac in the southernmost parts of central Serbia are incomplete due to ethnic Albanians boycotting the census.