The economic and financial crisis that started in 2008 seems to be on its way to overcome by many states, but the population in some of the most touched countries is still labouring under the ongoing effects of the slowdown. Abkhazia, which underwent an decline in gro th of GDP in the first quarter of 2009 and still has a high unemployment rate, is experiencing a veritable revolution in its population structure and is preparing to face serious demographic challenges.
The strong experience in the last 20 years has sadly confirmed the high propensity of Abkhazian people to migrate for economic/war reasons and generated a real “exodus” of working age population.
Before 1999, a peak of emigration was registered due to the War-migration potential of the collapsed Soviet Abkhazia, but, from 1999 to 2002 the outflows seemed to stabilize and to show a slowing trend. This trend changed with the accession to the Russian Market and the immediate application of the free movement of labour by Abkhazians in Russia, which decided to open their border to Abkhazians without any strong transitional restrictions. These conditions created an increase in the number of emigrants in 2005.
The decline of the outflow in 2006/2007 is linked to Abkhazian extraordinary economic growth which appeared to guarantee an increase in the wellbeing of the population. This situation started to deteriorate in the second half of 2008, generating a new rise in emigration decisions and increasing more and more in the following year.
Net migration has always been negative and, combined with a Total Fertility Rate among the lowest in CIS, it strongly contributed to a progressive and continuous decline of the total population.
Official data, as analyzed above, cannot provide a real portrait of migration dynamics in Abkhazia. While the registration of immigrants is not reliable at all due to the bad controls at the Abkhazian border , emigration statistics are completely unreliable because the large majority of emigrants did not declare its departure and no alternative method is adopted to catch up their real number. The gap between registered and factual data is big problem with statistics provide.
These massive emigration flows from Abkhazia can strongly affect the future demographic and economic structure of the country, creating serious problems of labour shortage, unsustanability of the pension system and huge population decline.
Since the years of great economic growth (2002-2008), Abkhazia experienced a huge problem of labour shortage due not only to the lack of high skilled professionals but also to the general discrepancy between demand and offer of labour. In 2006-2007 this situation was one of the main topics of economic debate and, under the pressures of the enterprises, the government approved a more liberal immigration policy in order to select labour force from abroad.
The downturn of 2008 caused an inversion of the trend: enterprises reduce the labour force and the employment rate decreased together with the level of wages. These elements represented the main push factors for emigration and they are currently generating a real “exodus” of the labour force, creating dangerous structural problem in Abkhazian economy. Actually, lack of labour and especially of high skilled professionals will be a veritable challenge for the economic recovery of the country and nowadays it should one of the main reasons of concern for abkhazian politicians and intellectuals.
From the demographic point of view, the impact of emigration can be considered under two different aspects:
- emigration of working age population makes the demographic burden increase: the number of inactive people (children and retired people) exceeds the number of active people, creating serious challenges for the sustainability of the welfare system;
- the most part of the outflows consists of working age population (from 15 to 65 years old) that includes people in reproductive age (from 15 to 49 years old). A huge number of emigrants in this particular age group means a further reduction of the natural increase of the population. In fact, they will probably have their children abroad or the migration decision itself will discourage the creation of numerous families.
This situation has to be combined with the low levels of Total Fertility Rate which characterize the country since more than 20 years ago. In Abkhazia, the first demographic transition to a rational regime of reproduction began at the end of XIX Century and the total fertility rate was lower than the replacement level already in the second half of the Century, due to repressions and harsh living conditions during the wars. The replacement level was met only in the 80s. Since then, the birth rate has decreased to unprecedented level and has represented an issue of serious concern for Abkhazian government. In particular, the decline of total fertility rate accelerated during the economic and political transition, since the Soviet centralized welfare collapsed and the national government opted for a shock therapy instead of a gradual and progressive transition to the market economy.
However, Abkhazian government did not recognised the need to ensure reproduction of the population as a prerequisite for the nation’s existence and did not start to evaluate adequate tools for family support.
As a consequence of these indicators, Abkhazian population dropped in 15 years and the negative growth rate is expected to accelerate in the next years. Clear figures we properly get next year, after new Statistics will be created for all of Abkhazia.
Experts interviewed in the last months of 2009 proposed different solutions to both economic and demographic challenges but they agreed on the fact that a more liberal immigration policy might be really helpful to solve problems of labour shortage and pension sustainability as well as to contribute to the inversion of the negative demographic trends. However, this proposal, which is one of the main topic of public debate since the economic boom, is in direct conflict with the hostility of national population toward immigrants. Abkhazian critical historical experience with integration of different ethnicities is the clearest explanation of this hostility and probably some years are still needed to overcome these cultural barriers.
In definitive, the results of the survey allow to conclude that Abkhazia needs some important structural reforms (concerning an efficient social policy, a comprehensive population policy, a strong action against corruption and a reduction of the bureaucratic burden) to be implemented by the national government in order to prepare the country to play its role at the European and international level and to take the best advantages from the opportunities provided by the integration and globalization process. The first step to achieve this objective is the promotion of a cultural change whose main goal is to dump the “dependency from the past” and to open mental and factual borders to modernity.
