According to statistics from the UN Population Department (UNITED NATIONS DESA), our country’s population is decreasing by 8 people every day, and 4 of these 8 have emigrated from the country. Only the official results of the past 2018 show that the population of Moldova has decreased by almost 3,000 people. Real statistics even darker – from 2014 to 2018 Moldova has lost nearly 100 people a day, and more than half of them – leave forever.
In the modern world, the main resource that ensures the welfare of the state is not oil, gas, gold or plutonium, but the country’s population. And when it is reduced – this applies to all, because in the long term quality of life will continue to fall at all. Therefore, by the way, the main sciences of the 21st century which study our society will be economics and demography in particular, and not a political science.
In our situation still more difficult – because the official statistics operates obviously inflated numbers, taking into account all the people who have Moldovan citizenship – is a method of accounting of the population, which was used in the USSR, when the migration was almost impossible. Modern techniques require to exclude from the calculations of all who are absent in the country for more than a year in a row. By the way, including why the results of the population census in 2014 so shocked – they, these figures have been adjusted.
The population of Moldova is declining primarily due to irretrievable migration, and here the official and actual statistics make differences in huge numbers of people. For example, according to the Center for Demographic Research at the National Institute for Economic Research, in reality more than 30 thousand people leave the country forever. The Vienna Institute of Demography, in its long-term outlook, generally speaks of a decrease in the population of Moldova by more than a third over the next 25 years. Moreover, the main reason for such sharp changes in all analytical forecasts is only migration, the benefit of the epidemic, military conflicts, famine and mass natural disasters bypass us at all.
Official statistics do not take into account the majority of migrants at all, since they never state that they actually emigrate, and almost always retain their Moldovan citizenship. The exception is the so-called “authorized emigration” – when an emigrant, for some reason, is forced to renounce Moldovan citizenship. For example, if he wants to work in the public services of his new country, or to take some elective office. Indicators of such a final break with Moldova are really not very high – about 2,000 people a year.
At the same time, the people and the money they bring – it is the main driver of the national economy. At the end of 2016, Moldovan migrants transferred $ 1.079 billion to the country, which is still a low quantity compared to 2008, when 1.66 billion was transferred. According to the World Bank, 21.7% of Moldovan GDP is provided by transfers from migrants that puts Moldova in seventh place in the world in terms of providing GDP with remittances. In the CIS, according to this indicator, we are overtaken only by Kyrgyzstan (34.5% of GDP and the first place in the world) and Tajikistan (26.9% of GDP and sixth place). Nepal (29.7%), Liberia (29.6%) and Haiti and Tonga (both 27.8% each) consistently located between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In addition to Moldova, the Comoros (21.2%), the Gambia (20.4%) and Honduras (18.4%) are in the TOP-10 by this indicator. But people are still more important than money, and the tremendous pace of migration hits the country more painfully than the money sent “heals”.
The system of social guarantees and migration.
When we talk about the realities of the Republic of Moldova, we proceed from the fact that three huge social systems operate in our country with alternating success, affecting the lives of everyone and everyone – the state health insurance system, the pension system and the education system. All of them are directly based on the number of the working population and specifically on the taxes that this population pays domestically. The formula is simple: less population – less money for these systems – they work even worse. And this is without taking into account the problems and debts already existing there and many other factors – corruption, salaries in envelopes, from which taxes are not paid, etc. For example, the current health insurance system in Moldova is already half dependent on informal payments.
All this concerns every person living in the country and this is directly dependent on how many people DO NOT live in it. For example, Moldova, like most post-Soviet countries, suffers from low life expectancy, in the first place – male. Moldovan men live on average 67.5 years, women 75 years, which gives 71 years of life for every Moldovan citizen on average, while in the EU countries the average figure for the beginning of 2017 exceeded 80 years, and for example in Germany is 83 years. The connection between the quality and availability of medicine, and life expectancy is obvious, not to mention the fact that there is an obvious connection between the place of permanent residence and life expectancy – the townspeople always live longer than the villagers, primarily because medicine is more accessible.
Not so simple. Yes, today Moldovan citizens officially working in many EU countries, Turkey and Russia can receive pensions and other social benefits from these countries, in accordance with the existing agreements on social protection. But the problem is that the bulk of the population will still receive Moldovan pensions and benefits, the size of which, to put it mildly, is very different from European, which in itself will force people to migrate. Other things being equal, the Moldovan pensioner receives an average of 1,301 lei and does not cover the subsistence minimum (about 64 Euro at the rate of the NBM), for example, a pensioner who has worked in accordance with German law – an average of 1013 Euro, with the right to receive a pension anywhere in the world. Such a gigantic social stratification will eventually lead to a mass exodus from the country of an absolute majority of at least some working-age population.
The problem is that the high rates of migration aggravate the global process of natural aging, which almost all countries of geographical Europe are undergoing now, and Moldova is no exception. In its most simplified form, the current pension system works on the principle that “the generation of parents receives pensions from the taxes of a generation of children” and then reproduces itself. Over the next 5–8 years, the single 63-year retirement age in the country will fit the largest generation from the stagnant Soviet sixties, while the smallest generation born in the late 1990s will enter the working age against the background of permanent economic crisis and default of those years.
If the current real migration rates will simply remain at the current level, a large part of this young generation will no longer live in Moldova, since able-bodied people will leave first of all. And it will start a domino effect that will work on a vicious circle – no money for the social sector, because there are no taxes, no taxes because there is nobody to pay them, while labor in the country is not enough, so the taxes there is no one to pay, and there are no taxes – there is no social security.
Education and migration.
Learning without a doubt is useful, necessary and important, and applied sciences, especially medicine, biotechnology, physics, etc. achieved such significant successes, including because they became international.
In Moldova, migration strikes the first blow not at universities, where, by the way, a lot of foreign citizens’ study, but at school education, especially in rural areas. It all works simply – leaving parents, as a rule, do not control whether their child goes to school, not to mention the cases when children are left to themselves. As a result, classes become more and more incomplete, the problem grows, schools begin to unite and close, politely calling it optimization. The principle of the existence of a large and, most importantly, living village has not changed since the XIX century – the village lives when there is a school in it. There is no school – no future, and the process of extinction becomes irreversible, and the process of urbanization (relocation to the city) becomes even more necessary.
At the same time, including due to the chronic lack of funding, the urban infrastructure does not cope with such an abrupt population growth, which leads to the fact that Chisinau, which does not have a million people even with agglomeration, is chronically standing in traffic jams “in the best traditions” Brussels, Moscow and London. Paradoxically, such a unidirectional urbanization forms in the majority of people something similar to the “systematic error of a survivor” – people assess the situation solely by what they see every day in front of them. Therefore, looking at the road situation in the capital, many sincerely cannot understand where the problem of mass emigration is visible.
Conclusions
It’s very boring, and have nothing heroic, only just systematic and everyday work for everyone. There is an urgent need to improve the situation in three key areas that directly interact with migration – health, social support and education. All this together rests on the development of the economy, but debugging only these three systems will fundamentally change the economic situation within the country. By and large, there is no fundamentally different way, and the Moldovan society, through the efforts of the political class, has been beating in convulsions and convulsions of the universal choice of a geopolitical orientation on a local scale for more than 25 years, at risk of losing itself during the life of one generation.