This Country Is Struggling to Reverse a Shrinking Population

DAGDA, Latvia—For nearly three decades, Inara Frolova, a local civil servant, has recorded just how rapidly this distant district on Latvia’s japanese border has dwindled. When her a few brothers, her 1st husband and her son remaining for Ireland, she wrote it down. When births strike their cheapest-at any time degree previous year, she entered the information.

This year, with its population at approximately half of what it was in 1990, Dagda County was deemed much too little to aid a local government and merged with a close by county.