Robbie gets older when he wants to: Western Balkans Moving Towards Age

This year's first chronicleric is launched with the aging of the population in northern Macedonia, a time bomb with demographic views.

In Valandovo 146km from Skopje capital, stores are abandoned at this beginning of the year, and largely empty roads offer little life signs because young people are fleeing to a large number hoping to find a better life abroad. According to World Bank data some 600,000 Macedonian citizens now live abroad, and Northern Macedonia has lost 10% of its population in the last 30 years.

Lack of investment has turned the country into the home of only 1.8 million people. In Valandovo alone, nearly 90 percent of people's income is linked to agriculture, a common denominator throughout northern Macedonia.

Initial results from Macedonia's latest census, conducted in September, estimate that the population here has dropped by more than 200,000 since 2002. For those staying in the country, monthly salaries average 470 euros. Citizens say it's better to be a slave for 2,000 euros in a foreign country than being a slave with 300 euros at home.

In Albania, some 1.7 million people, or approximately 37 percent of the population, have left the country in the past three decades, according to government figures. Hundreds of thousands fled Serbia to move abroad after the 1990s wars that hit the economy, with estimates suggesting that up to 10,000 doctors left in the last 30 years. All Western Balkan countries have been affected to different degrees by migration.

The main reasons are economic, but in addition, social reasons occupy an increasingly important location”. For Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, Northern Macedonia and Serbia all hopes are that EU membership will change the fate of ordinary people.

Even Croatia since EU membership in 2013, its population of slightly more than four million has contracted by nearly 10%.

The United Nations predicts that Croatia will have only 2.5 million people by the end of the century.

Zagreb promised Croatian immigrants to the European Union up to 26,000 euros to return and start a business, but now it seems too late. The “Shates” fill the eastern Pozega region, one of the most hit by war in the 1990s. More than 16 per cent of the area's population of about 80,000 people has fled in the last decade, official figures show.