Being myself an emigrant from Croatia, I am interested in Croatian migration trends in last few decades. As one of ex-Yugoslav republics, in the last 30 years Croatia faced three events that could have an impact to its population:
- Yugoslav wars (1991 – 1995), led to the breakup of Yugoslavia
- Great Recession (2008), with follow-up recessions shaking Croatia until 2014
- Croatia joined EU (2013), Croatians acquired right to move and reside freely in other EU member states
This research is very personal to me. In addition to me emigrating (event #1) in 1995, my younger nephew emigrated this year (event #3). So, let’s start crunching the data.
- The Yugoslav wars heavily impacted population of Croatia for almost a decade
- The Great Recession had a smaller but still significant impact that lasted for many years
- I believe from experience that joining EU caused continuous population decline. A significant number of young people is leaving Croatia every year. But in our data set there is no data that could collaborate this. We need data after year 2014 to be able to make any conclusion.
- There is no direct relationship between GDP and population decline.
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Python
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Pandas
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Matplotlib
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Jupyter Notebook
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Folium
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geoJSON
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Choropleth maps
For this project I used the following datasets:
- World Development Indicators Dataset - due to size, this dataset was not uploaded to GitHub Data Source: https://www.kaggle.com/worldbank/world-development-indicators Folder: 'world-development-indicators‘
- Data/yugo-countries.json - country coordinates for plotting (original file was updated by me to leave only coordinates for ex-Yugoslav countries) Source: https://github.com/python-visualization/folium/blob/master/examples/data/world-countries.json