Previously, in Part 5: money sent home is counted, but what skilled people take with them when they leave is counted nowhere. Read Part 5
Main findings
- Georgia has lost about a fifth of its 1990 population, like Lithuania and Moldova.
- Georgia's registered fall in children per woman is among the largest in the comparison.
- Lithuania shows the flow can turn, but it took fifteen years after joining the EU.
Is Georgia unusual?
Low fertility is a world trend. Emigration is the post-Soviet story. Georgia's registered fall in fertility is among the fastest.
Georgia has lost a fifth of its people since 1990
Share of the 1990 population lost by 2024. Almost three quarters of Georgia's loss came by 2000.
Georgia is not the extreme case. Latvia, Bulgaria and Lithuania lost a larger share of their people, and Moldova and Romania almost as much. What sets Georgia apart is the timing: almost three quarters of its loss came by 2000, during the wars and the economic collapse, while most of the other countries lost the larger part of theirs after 2000, many of them once EU membership made it easy to work abroad. Georgia's and Moldova's figures cover only the territory under government control.
Children per woman fell in most countries here, and Georgia's registered fall is among the largest
Children per woman: each arrow runs from 2014 to the latest year. Sorted by the size of the fall.
Georgia fell from 2.31 children per woman in 2014 to 1.53 in 2025. It started higher, so it is still above the EU (1.34), and World Bank estimates show a smaller fall. The speed matters: a fast fall is more consistent with postponement than with a slow change in values, though postponed births are not always made up later.
The Baltic lesson: people can come back
For twenty years Lithuania was a byword for emigration, and joining the EU in 2004 did not stop it. In the first years after membership the outflow grew: in 2010, after the financial crisis, the country lost about 25 people for every 1,000 residents in a single year. Only in 2019, fifteen years after joining, did more people arrive than leave, before any refugees from Ukraine. UN estimates show more departures than arrivals again in 2025.
Lithuania and Estonia turned the tide when incomes were near 80% of the EU average. Georgia is at 43%.
For each country: income per person as a share of the EU average, 2000 to 2024, and every year's arrivals minus departures per 1,000 residents. "Turned" means more people arrived than left every year from then until 2022.
More people arrived than leftMore people left than arrived2022-2023: arrivals after Russia's invasion of Ukraine80% of the EU average
Membership was not a switch. Lithuania's turn came only after fifteen years of growth had lifted its income from about half of the EU average to about four-fifths. Georgia's is at 43%. EU membership also offered a more predictable future: a young person could plan a career, a mortgage and a family knowing which way the country was heading. That is the value of waiting again, working in the other direction. For Georgia the lesson is patience as much as direction: even with a clear path, the flow would turn only slowly.
What would change the story
If waiting is the problem, the answer is to make committing less risky.
Three priorities
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Make the future easier to plan
Uncertainty is the common thread in this story. Stable rules, courts people trust and a clear direction on Europe lower the value of waiting for everyone at once, as Lithuania's experience suggests (above). No cash bonus can replace a future that young people can plan around.
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Lower the cost of the first step
Most of the missing babies are first babies (Part 1). Support helps most where starting a family costs most: a first home, affordable childcare, and jobs that fit with a young child. Help with a mortgage should not wait until a child is born, because then it comes too late for the families that never start. It could begin at the wedding: for example, a couple could keep the right to a lower interest rate or a smaller down payment on a first home for one to three years after they marry.
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Make leaving reversible
Two in three young adults would leave for a while, but only one in seven forever (Part 4), so treat Georgians abroad as a pool of skills, not a loss. Recognise foreign diplomas quickly and make return simple. Georgian law does not, as a rule, allow two citizenships: a Georgian who becomes a citizen of the country where they live loses Georgian citizenship, unless they asked for and received the President's consent beforehand. For someone who has settled abroad, that can mean choosing between the two passports, and every year since 2015 between about 1,200 and 5,300 people have stopped being Georgian citizens.
However, it should be noted that the data have limits. Timing is not proof: weddings fell after each shock, but these data do not prove that the shocks caused the fall. Two things moving together is a correlation, not proof of cause and effect, and education and later marriage were changing at the same time.
Births will keep falling for a while, whatever is done. The generation now in its twenties is small, so the number of babies will fall for some years even if no one postpones any longer. Family policies also work slowly and modestly: studies of rich countries find small effects of benefits and childcare on the number of births, and larger effects on their timing.
Finally, some numbers are estimates. Migration figures come from border crossings and are revised, survey answers about leaving are intentions rather than decisions, and the data do not cover Abkhazia and the Tskhinvali region.
The usual headline is that "Georgia is disappearing". The data say something more precise and more hopeful. Georgians are waiting: to marry, to have a first child, to decide whether to stay or come back. Far more say they would leave for a while than for good. The size of the next generation will not be decided by how much Georgians love children. It will be decided by whether the future starts to look worth committing to.
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Lukasi Kalandia
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