Armenia's population drops under 3 million for first time since independence

According to the preliminary data of the census conducted by the authorities last October and published this week, the permanent population of Armenia is slightly less than 3 million people.

The Statistics Committee reports that 2,928,914 people usually live in the country, but are not there for up to a year, RFE/RL's Armenian service reports.

This is about 90 thousand people less than the permanent population of Armenia according to the similar census conducted in 2011. During the population census in 2022, the number of people physically present in Armenia was about 233,000 less than 12 years ago.

Last year's population census was the third since Armenia gained independence in 1991. It was originally supposed to be held in 2020, but had to be postponed twice - first to 2021 and then to 2022 - due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Experts in Armenia have not yet deeply analyzed the results of the last population census, waiting for the final data to be presented by the authorities. But some demographers are already seeing a troubling pattern.

This is the first time in independent Armenia that the permanent population of the country has dropped below 3 million.

Candidate of historical sciences, ethnogeographer Artashes Boyajyan, who participated as a supervisor in the population census in both 2001 and 2011, says that if the population was decreasing in Armenia until 2018 due to migration, it was the decrease in the birth rate that became a problem later.

"After 2018, a number of provinces of the Republic of Armenia, especially Lori, recorded a negative balance of natural growth for the first time, that is, the number of births was less than the number of deaths. The same situation was recorded in Shirak province in 2020, as well as in a number of other provinces of the republic," Boyajyan told RFE/RL's Armenian service.

The current government of Armenia and its predecessors have set goals for the people of Armenia. In 2020, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced the country's strategy until 2050 and spoke about the goal of increasing the country's permanent population to at least 5 million people.

According to Boyajyan, despite this high goal, the state has not been able to implement any serious demographic policy aimed at its implementation.

"In the period under review, some steps have been taken to promote population growth, but it has no qualitative and quantitative impact," the expert said.

Considering the demographic decline caused by the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the social and economic hardships of the population in the newly independent countries in the coming years, the declining birth rate is now a typical pattern for most former Soviet states.

The UN predicts that the population of Armenia will decrease to 2.6 million people by 2050.