The population of Hungary has been decreasing since the 1980s. How does this change affect the rural and urban areas? What is the ratio of males and females in the municipalities of Hungary? Our project aims to answer these and similar questions by illustrating tendencies of the population change regarding each municipality of the country, city size, and sex.

Let’s take a look at the population change by city size from 1986. The municipalities were put into five categories and the following groups were formed: cities under 5,000 inhabitants, cities from 5,000 to 20,000 inhabitants, cities from 20,000 to 100,000 inhabitants, cities over 100,000 inhabitants, and the capital city (Budapest). It was found that the number of residents of small villages (cities under 5,000) is steadily falling. The population of the center of Hungary (Budapest) was decreasing between 1986 and 2005. Since this period it roughly stagnates.

It is time to dig deeper and explore the female-male ratio of the certain municipality types. The chart below presents how the number of males and females changed by city size.

How the population of each municipality of Hungary has changed can be studied in the chart below. You can select a city from the list or start typig.

To get a deeper insight of the population changes, let’s compare the number of inhabitants of 2018 with that of 1986. The map below shows the name of each Hungarian city and the percent with which the population of the given municipality changed. The negative number means shrinkage, the positive means growth. The change is ranked from -4 to +6. The scale was created by translating the percentages into 11 categories in the following way:

The ratio of the population of 2018 comparing to 1986	Category
-65% –	-4
-65% – -45%	-3
-45% – -25%	-2
-25% – 0%	-1
0%	0
0% – 25%	1
25 – 45%	2
45 – 65%	3
65 – 85%	4
85 – 105%	5
105% –	6

The folloing map shows a static image of the population of Hungary of 1986. The bigger the dot that marks the city is, the more popolous it is.

Tendencies of population change can be observed in the map below. Shades represent density. The darker the municipality is, the more popolous it is.

Data sources and resources

The Hungarian census data was downloaded from https://www.nyilvantarto.hu/archiv_honlap/kozos/index.php?k=statisztikai_adatok_lakossagi_moalllakossaga_hu_archiv

Find the accompanying code repository here.