The eternal village - decline and survival. The change in the population of the villages

Abstract

The aim of the study is to analyse change in the population of villages in the period from 1995 to 2016. We organized the data of the Central Statistical Office (CSO) and the Land Information System (LIS) into a new database for the purposes of the research. The analysis discusses reasons for the decline in the absolute population number of the rural population and presents the population impact of the transition of 152 larger villages to urban administrative status. Some of the new rural towns, mainly in metropolitan agglomerations, may have seen an increase in population, but in nearly half of the new towns the new administrative rank could not stop population decline.

The article first presents long-term trends in population change between settlements (villages, towns, regional centres, capital). The following section discusses migration and demographic processes of the villages, changes in population dynamics, the relationships between the development level of the settlements and migration. According to the indicator of population dynamics, more than one third of the municipalities belong to the fully decreasing category from year to year, while the proportion of growing municipalities varies around 10 percent.

The study shows a large decrease in the absolute population number of villages, but at the same time a relative stability of the population of villages with unchanged administrative status, which results in a rearrangement of population processes between smaller and larger villages. The population of villages with the same administrative classiRcation was relatively stable over 20 years. The loss of the total rural population was barely three percent. In contrast, there has been a remarkable population change between village categories in terms of population size. A substantial proportion of the inhabitants of hamlets does not migrate to cities but to larger villages and this migration leads to significant structural, demographic changes and distortions in the society of both types of rural settlements.