Guess how many Hungarians there will be in 2051

It is a sad fact that the population of Hungary has been decreasing since 1981; therefore, many Hungarian demographers and professionals have warned that if the trend continues, the Hungarian nation would slowly disappear from Europe. As a result, the government introduced several measures to help couples that have children, from tax allowances to direct financial support. However, it seems that it is difficult to reverse the process.

Portfolio‘s journalist József Lennert made some calculations about what the future of Hungarians looks like and showed the results on some diagrams that you may find in his article. According to him, he calculated with various models, so we can summarise his findings in good and bad “scripts”.

Mr Lennert says that the trend of the population decline will not change by 2051, but there will be significant regional differences, meaning that there will be villages from where

40 pc of the current population will disappear in 30 years,

while there will be regions where the decline will not be too significant, or the overall trend will be positive. He said that he used a so-called agent-centred model to calculate future trends, which means that he tried to predict how Hungarians would move in the country to simulate demographic trends better. According to him, people may use four inland migration types:

• for education
• for work
• suburbanisation
• welfare migration, where they move to regions offering higher living standards.

He created 33 schemes, each calculating with a different hypothesis regarding productivity, mortality, climate change, social and economic development, etc. Sadly, all the schemes show the trend of population decline, but differences in the results are significant. According to Mr Lennert, in 2051, the population of Hungary

could be between 8.3 million and 9.1 million.

Based on the calculations, the dependency ratio will increase significantly from 25 pc (2019) to 61-65 pc (2051). Furthermore, Mr Lennert found that there would be regional differences in the population flow. For example, the number of people moving to Budapest and its neighbourhood will rise, so the population there will probably not decrease that much, or it could even increase. He predicted the same trend for the area around Lake Balaton where wealthy people will move.

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Meanwhile, Southern-Transdanubia and the southern part of the Great Hungarian Plain will lose much of their population.

There will be villages where the number of people will decrease by up to 60 pc between 2011 and 2051.

Source: portfolio.hu