Chisinau

Moldova has lost 40% of its population since 1991. The diaspora may now be larger than the resident population. The capital, Chisinau, is shrinking by several hundred people per year — not from low birth rates alone, but because the country's most educated and experienced workers leave and do not return.

This makes Chisinau the capital of what ecologists would recognise as a source-sink population. The country produces human capital — teachers, engineers, nurses, programmers — and exports it to Romania, Italy, Germany, and Russia. The diaspora sends cash back: $2 billion annually, roughly 12% of GDP. The economy does not produce enough value to retain its own workforce. It survives on the remittances of the people it could not employ.

The dependency has deep structural roots. Moldova is Europe's poorest country. Its traditional economic base — agriculture and food processing, accounting for 40% of GDP — cannot generate wages competitive with EU labour markets next door. The wine industry employs 200,000 people and once made Moldova a top-ten global exporter, until Russia's 2006 embargo forced a wrenching diversification toward European markets. Chisinau's machine-building and light manufacturing sectors, established in the Soviet era, never scaled to absorb the surplus labour that agriculture shed.

The geopolitical vulnerability compounds the economic one. Russia cut gas deliveries on January 1, 2025, forcing Moldova to buy electricity from Romania at nearly double the price. The breakaway region of Transnistria — Russian-backed, occupying a strip of territory along the Ukrainian border — drains resources without contributing tax revenue. Moldova exists in the contested space between EU accession (negotiations opened June 2024, with 28 of 33 screening chapters completed) and Russian leverage through energy, territory, and diaspora politics.

The wine sector tells the resilience story. After Russia's embargo destroyed 80% of Moldova's alcohol export market overnight, producers pivoted to EU certification, quality upgrades, and premium positioning. Export volumes have declined while export values hold steadier — classic premiumisation. The Milestii Mici cellars, holding a Guinness Record for 200 kilometres of underground tunnels and 1.5 million bottles, represent the stored capital of a century of winemaking that no embargo can relocate.

But the fundamental arithmetic remains brutal. Twenty percent of Moldovan businesses report labour shortages. The population is declining. The best-educated leave first. Every year that passes without EU accession or industrial transformation deepens the dependency on cash sent home by people who voted with their feet. Chisinau is a capital city running on the metabolic output of its own emigrants — an organism that survives by consuming the energy its departed cells generate elsewhere.