77 percent of young people wish to leave the country

The National Youth Report prepared by the Ministry of Culture and Youth Affairs of the Republic of Armenia has revealed that according to sociological polls conducted in 2005, 77 percent of 16-to-30-year olds expressed the desire to leave the homeland, in other words, to emigrate. Only 21 percent of the young people surveyed wished to continue living in their current place of residence.

The polls suggest that there are numerous reasons that young people want to leave the country, but the most significant is the socio-economic situation. Although according to the official figures our country has for several years now registered two-digit annual economic growth, the 16- to 30-year-old citizens of Armenia (who constitute about 25 percent of total population or according to official data, 840,000 people) leave the country at the first opportunity.

The first wave of emigration from the two northern regions of Armenia began after the devastating earthquake of 1988. The second wave was a consequence of the Karabakh war. In the beginning it was a forced migration. After the bloody pogroms in Azerbaijan, hundreds of thousands of Armenians escaped mainly to Armenia and Russia. The number of refugees from Azerbaijan in 1989-1991 came to 360,000; later on some 48,000 people left Nagorno Karabakh and some 72,000 left the Armenian-Azerbaijani border villages.

From the end of 1991, the third wave of mass emigration to CIS and other countries began. According to rough estimates, at least 1.1 million people have emigrated from Armenia in the last 15 years due to the socio-economic situation, the Karabakh conflict, the blockades, and the energy crisis, all of which brought about a sharp fall in living standards.

The National Youth Report states that in recent years, there has been a visible trend toward the aging of the population in Armenia, caused by a twofold reduction in the birth rate, in the number of children born to families, and in marriages, as a result of socio-economic conditions: “If we also add the fact that the majority of those leaving the country are young, working-age people, it becomes evident that the process of aging in Armenia manifests itself not in the classical sense but as a specific process of the deprivation of youth.”

According to UN and Council of Europe data, before 1990 some 80,000 children were born annually, but since the mid-1990s this number has fallen to 30,000. The number of married women under the age of fifty has also dropped. In aging Europe, 62 percent of women under the age of fifty are married, but in Armenia only 50 percent are. In our country each woman has on average 1.2 children; to reproduce the population, this number should be 2.1.

Shavarsh Kocharyan, a member of parliament who has followed the demographic trends in Armenia for years, says: “If the present policy does not changed, the population of Armenia will not grow until 2050, and, at the same time, the drastic aging of the population will occur with all the negative consequences – there will be fewer working people than necessary for each pensioner and, second, we already have a problem with conscription today, and this problem will get worse.”

According to UN classification, societies are divided into three groups – aging, demographically old, and oldest-old. The aging index is calculated as the number of persons 60 years old or over per hundred persons under age 15.

Suzanna Barseghyan of the Armenian Center for National and International Studies (ACNIS) says: “In aging societies the elderly population makes up at least 7 percent of population; in demographically old societies this number exceeds 14 percent; and in oldest-old societies 20 percent. Thus, it took France 115 to make the transition from an “aging” to an “old” society, the US 72 years, the United Kingdom 47 years, Germany 40 years and Japan – 24 years.”

Shavarsh Kocharyan believes that urgent measures are needed to change the current situation: “States carry out various policies against aging. There are two approaches in Europe: on the one hand, encouraging immigration, and on the other hand, encouraging an increase in births. The latter is characteristic of the Scandinavian states, where special attention toward families, mothers and newborn children is manifest. As for immigration it only solves the problem of aging partly, or doesn't solve it at all. A common policy of encouraging both immigration and an increased birth rate is essential. Ireland has achieved great success in this area.”

Social scientist Aharon Adibekyan agrees: “If Diaspora-Armenians come to Armenia, they will come with low birth-rate standards and it won't be a solution, it will only temporary postpone aging. There are nations that realize they are in danger of disappearing and try to preserve the optimal birth-rate level. Other countries import manpower and try to quickly assimilate these workers -usually not from alien cultures but from neighboring ones. For example, Russia can to some extent improve its demographic situation through immigration from Ukraine and Belarus.”

Adibekyan believes that a state policy is needed, as has recently been the case in Russia, where the state supports young families, helping them to get apartments and providing them with sizable amounts of money for their second, third, and other children. The social scientist notes that by the number of births, Armenia today is a 1.5 million-person republic: “This means that if the number 30,000 births a year is maintained for the coming decades, the population of Armenia will be 1.5 million people, and one might see the day that Armenians disappear from their historical homeland. The Germans, for example, have calculated that if the present rate is maintained in their country, 12 generations from now Germans will constitute a minority in their country. The same might happen with the Armenians and this is a very serious problem.”

Among the CIS countries, Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova are in a very difficult demographic situation; Azerbaijan, thanks to a high birth rate, is in better shape. According to Shavarsh Kocharyan, the demographic situation in Georgia is also better than in Armenia. “If the policies do not change, Armenia will become one of the oldest nations in Europe,” he says.

An aging society like Armenia faces a number of other problems: a quantitative reduction in work supply, an alteration of the structure of the labor market, low productivity, slowing down of economic growth, and so on. Suzanna Barseghyan notes that with aging, the volume of exportable goods decreases, tax proceeds decline due to the slowing down in economic growth, and consequently the state budget decreases. “And this is just in the economic sphere. Enormous changes take place in families, social relations, socio-cultural behavior, value systems, etc.,” she says.

And to conclude I will illustrate the extent to which the birthrate is decreasing in our country through two examples. There are today two pupils enrolled in first grade in the school in a village with 150 households in the area bordering Azerbaijan that I attended as a child. When I was in first grade 30 years ago, our class, the smallest in the school had twelve pupils. This year my son is a first grader. The Yerevan school he is going to has just one first grade class, with eight children.