UNFPA: Balkan diaspora huge, 12 percent of Serbs living “abroad”

Declining mortality and fertility rates are happening everywhere, in some places sooner than in others, reads the report "8 Billion Lives, Infinite Possibilities: The Case for Rights and Choices."

This is why, in some places, there is concern about “too many” people, and, in others, about “too few” people.

The concern about “too few” people is particularly widespread in Eastern Europe, where low fertility rates go hand in hand with elevated rates of emigration.

As a result, the population has declined, in some cases by more than 25 percent since the early 1990s, reads the report.

The Balkan diaspora is huge. According to the 2021 data of the Migration Data Portal, 53 percent of the people born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 45 percent of those born in Albania, and 12 percent of people born in Serbia are living outside their countries.

The UNFPA report says that Balkan governments’ incentives to woo the diaspora back are no surprise.

It adds that Serbia has a sophisticated combination of tax relief and start-up help, while Croatia offers 26,000 euros in subsidies to Croatians who come home and start a business.

National governments are not the only ones helping people return. In Serbia, Returning Point is a non-governmental organization whose mission is to create a better climate for repats.

“When I decided to return to Serbia, I reached out to Returning Point. I took a chance to see what things were like here, and my quality of life is now much better,” says Ivana Zubac, a financial controller who spent 20 years in Western Europe and now helps mentor other newly returned Serbians.

Jelena Peric, a pediatric nurse, also returned to Serbia from Munich, where she had been working since 2011. She received support from the German aid agency GIZ.

“I wanted to help families learn about breastfeeding, which is not very popular in Serbia,” she said.

The report says that Serbia has a population of 7.1 million, of which 15 percent are those aged 0-14, 10 per cent are aged 10-19, with 65 percent of the population aged 15-65 and 20 percent of people over 60 years of age.

Women in Serbia have 1.5 children on the average, while life expectancy is 72, reads the report.