Slovakia: Getting Old Fast

First of all, there are a lot less students than there used to be. In 2008 there were 214,309 in higher education in the country, but by 2020 there were only 116,124. Students studying abroad account for some of that - but not all. There are just a lot less Slovaks of university age and, by contrast, more pensioners every year. There are also ever less people of working age, and unless more migrants come to Slovakia, what are already serious labour shortages will turn critical.

Slovakia's population will soon start to shrink if it has not done so already, and its people are ageing. That is no surprise. Those are the same trends elsewhere in much of Central and Eastern Europe.

What's alarming demographers, however, is that that while Slovakia's total population has remained relatively constant for years, they are uncertain about the accuracy of official population data.

Yet for Ludmila Ivancikova, director for demography at the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic, the bottom line is that Slovaks are not only ageing rapidly, but they are ageing at a much faster rate than their neighbours.

Getting old… fast

In December the Statistical Office released the first data based on the 2021 census. It revealed that on January 1, 2021 there were believed to be 5,449,270 people in the country.

If that figure is right, it means that the total number of people in Slovakia was then 45,000 more than a decade previously and 166,270, or 3.1 per cent, more than in 1991.

According to Slovakia's Ministry of Interior, there were 152,902 foreigners living legally in the country in the middle of last year. They made up 2.8 per cent of the population.

Until Slovakia joined the EU in 2004, there were very few...