Alarming demographic trends continue.
In just 56 of the 555 towns and municipalities in Croatia were there more births than deaths during 2016, reports Jutarnji List on 24 July 2017.
The only county in which more people were born was Međimurje County, where there were 15 babies more than the number of deceased persons. There are five counties in which there is not a single town or municipality in which the number of births exceeded the number of deaths.
In general, 14,005 more people died than were born last year in the whole of Croatia.
According to detailed data published by the Central Bureau of Statistics, the positive ratio between the number of births and deaths was recorded mostly in towns and municipalities surrounding large centres, such as Dugo Selo and Sveta Nedjelja near Zagreb, Solin, Podstrana and Kaštela near Split, and Viškovo not far from Rijeka.
Such trend has been present for a number of years and is attributed to the fact that younger people, due to lower cost of living, are increasingly driven from larger cities to nearby towns; the average age of the population in towns close to major cities is five to seven years lower than the average in the big cities themselves. For example, the average resident of Rijeka is 44.5 years old, while the average resident of Viškovo is 37.9 years old; in Dugo Selo, the average age is 37.4, while in Zagreb it is 43.3.
However, the best ratio was recorded in Imotski, in which the number of births was as much as 51 percent higher than the number of deaths. Still, this data should be taken with a grain of salt: some of the children born in the town were children whose mothers actually live in nearby Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The worst ratio between the number of births and deaths was registered in Vrlika, where 11 children were born, and 51 persons died. In one municipality, Zadvarje in Split-Dalmatia County, not a single child was born last year.
During the last year, there was a record high number of divorces: 7,036 couples were divorced, while 20,467 were married. That means that the ratio between marriages and divorces was just 2.9, which is the worst ratio since the statistics are monitored.
Last year, there were no divorces in two towns – Novi Vinodolski and Senj. The number of divorces in Sisak and Pula was almost equal to the number of weddings: in Sisak, there were just 1.18 marriages per one divorce, while in Pula the ratio was 1.26. On the other side of the rankings, in Benkovac and Vrgorac there were as many as 31 marriages for each divorce.
Translated from Jutarnji List.
