MOSCOW, August 5. /TASS/. One hundred and twenty nine small Russian towns with 3.4 mln people residing there may disappear amid negative demographic trends and the decline of population employment, the Izvestia newspaper reports, citing an expert research.
For the time being, more than 3.4 mln people are living in towns with the population less than 50,000. The population in such towns declined by 314,500 over the last decade. The greatest dip in the population was recorded in northern coal, metals and lumber towns. Authors of the research believe that a number of settlements in Bryansk, Novgorod, Kirov and Krasnoyarsk Regions has the greatest exposure.
Such towns are short of inner resources for development and it is also difficult to uniformly allocate external resources in view of a big number of small towns, researchers said. The decline of employment and smaller number of small and medium businesses are among drivers of the dramatic population decline.