The population census conducted last year shows that Croatia has 152,571 fewer inhabitants than ten years ago, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Monday.
Of 4,284,889 people Croatia had in 2011, 3,697,143, or 86.28%, identified themselves as Roman Catholic, 4.44% as Christian Orthodox, 3.81% as atheists, and 0.76% as agnostics. Muslims were the third largest confession, accounting for 1.47%.
By comparison, in 2001 87.97% of the population described themselves as Roman Catholic, 4.42% as Eastern Orthodox, 2.22% as atheists and 0.03% as agnostics.
Broken down by ethnicity, 3,874,321 people, or 90.42%, identified themselves as Croats (compared to 89.63% in 2001), followed by Serbs, who accounted for 4.36% of the population or 186,633 people (compared to 4.54% in 2001), and Bosniaks, who accounted for 1.47% or 63,000.
The census also shows that Croatia has more women than men, namely 2,218,554 women and 2,066,335 men. The average age of the population increased from 39.3 years in 2001 to 41.7 years in 2011. Last year women were 43.4 years old on average, or 2.3 years more than a decade ago, while the average age of men was 39.9 years, compared to 37.5 years in 2001. Most of the population, 952,822, were aged between 50 and 60.
