Review of depopulation of the border villages in the context of national security risk

Abstract

According to internationally comparable statistical indicators, Serbia is among the countries with the highest development disparities (regional and local), both among Balkan neighbors and European scale. Large differences in development occur during the second half of the last century, a period culminating in the failed socio-economic transition of the millennium. Devastation and depopulation are causal phenomena, the population rapidly leaving impoverished areas and gravitate to the larger centers. Conditionally speaking, the more developed cities continue to develop while poor towns and villages are still poor. Proverb says, 'Whose sheep, that and the mountains. ' Emptying the territory highly correlated with an increase in surface area of agricultural land uncultivated, thus permanently extinguished agriculture as the main activity and main source of income in rural areas. Emptying the territory is the biggest development problem in Serbia, but also represents one of the biggest national security risks. Increasingly, the question whether Serbia will in the future be able to keep the territory in which he remains without population and whether the threshold bezbednostnog risk isšražnjene administration of the territory in the border areas. This paper presents a statistical description of census data in 1971, 1981, 1991, 2002 and 2011 as well as the analysis of demographic trends in border settlements for the considered period. The paper also proposed a set of measures and recommendations for overcoming depopulation, in accordance with available resources and the natural limits of border settlements.

Keywords

• development disparities
• depopulation
• a national security risk