BUDAPEST - Population
More than one in six of the Hungarian population live in Budapest
Nearly 17% of the Hungarian population lives in Budapest - a total of 1 719 thousand people at 1st of January 2003, having decreased by 5.8% compared to 1998. The population density of the city was 3 274 people per square kilometre though the density in the various districts of the city varies widely, between 500 and 30 000. The role of the capital in the country's settlement pattern is reflected by the fact that the second biggest city in Hungary, Debrecen, has a population of 205 thousand, and there are only 7 other cities in addition with more than 100 000 inhabitants.
Migration always played a key role in the growth of the capital's population. In the last third of the 19th century the number of inhabitants grew dramatically, a trend which continued until the 1960s, although from the 1950s onwards the only source of population growth was inward migration. This migration always tended to be sufficient to counterbalance the natural decreases in population and even to lead to a slight increase. During the 1980s, however, the situation was reversed and the population continued to fall in the 1990s and 2000s at an average annual rate of nearly 23 000.
Despite the positive developments in the last few years both in Budapest and the country as a whole, life expectancy remains lower than in West European countries. Thus, in 2002 the life expectancy at birth of Budapest men and women were 70.1 and 77.2 years, respectively.
The birth rate is very low in Budapest: 8.4 per thousand inhabitants in 2001, which was the lowest of any county of Hungary. At the opposite, the death rate was relatively high compared to the rest of the country, at 14.1 deaths per thousand inhabitants. Thus, the natural increase is largely negative in Budapest. In 2001, the infant mortality rate in the capital (8.8 per thousand live births) was comparable with the average for the country (8.1 per thousand live births).
The population is older compared to the country as a whole: in 2001, in Budapest, the people under 25 represented 30.0% of the population (31.1% for Hungary as a whole) while the share of people over 65 in the county was 17.8% (against 15.1% nationally).
A large number of foreign citizens live in Budapest - about 44 000 people. A third of all foreigners with residence permits staying in Hungary for a period of longer than a year live in Budapest. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the number of Chinese people has expanded in the city.
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