Russian population

miketheterrible wrote:

Over populating isn't a solution to problems either.

miketheterrible wrote:Over populating isn't a solution to problems either.

Generation of 1990s ready to take Russia to depopulation

Russia faces the danger of depopulation: the generation of the 1990s has entered the childbearing age. This generation is too small in size and is unlikely to ensure natural reproduction of the Russian population. Russia experienced a monstrous decline in the birth rate during the 1990s. Nowadays, the phenomenon may occur again.
Regions of Russia, where the birth rate is lowest, have received 16 billion rubles of funds from the federal budget. The families residing in those regions also receive financial support for third and subsequent children. Will it save the country, though? Pravda.Ru meets scientific director of the Independent Institute for Family and Demography Affairs, Igor Beloborodov, to talk about the looming population crisis.

"Some experts believe that the depopulation problem has been solved for Russia, while others say that the country needs to prepare for the worst. What kind of demographic situation do you think Russia has at the moment?"

"Those who say that the demographic crisis in Russia will end are charlatans. They are no experts at all. In reality, the age structure in Russia will deteriorate further in 2017 and then till 2020. The number of potential parents will halve in comparison with their amount 10-15 years ago.

"One has to be a total idiot to expect the demographic crisis in Russia to end under such circumstances. Yet, those people who believe that the impending demographic crisis will be fatal are not right either. A lot will depend on what kind of policy Russia will conduct.
"It is possible to increase the birth rate for the insignificant number of parents that we have. This can be done within the period of ten years. To accomplish that, one needs to completely change television broadcasts, introduce the concept of demographic security, especially on television. What we need is a massive social family-oriented campaign. If people come across the concept of family and family values everywhere, this propaganda will bring its results. For the time being, we do not have anything like this in the country. Where can a higher birth rate come from if there is absolutely no necessary propaganda?

"The education system needs to be revised as well. Russian literature, history, social science - these subjects must carry the notion of family. One must bring the spirit of parenthood and family, love for children to younger people, and one must do it at all times.

"If the authorities think that they can simply allocate 16 billion rubles and then do nothing, then they are terribly wrong. Money is not important here. It is the spiritual condition of the society that matters. Of course, it is necessary to revive family from the inside.

"One needs to do a lot indeed. One has to revise the pension system in the country so that a person understands at their young age that their pension would depend on the number of children. This would be fair. The current pension system in Russia is falling apart, because present-day taxpayers will not be able to support the growing legion of pensioners.

"A family of five and six should be prestigious and attractive, and one should make young people think about having large families. For the time being, however, there is an opposite trend. People of limited means give birth to many children, while wealthy individuals live in large houses alone."


http://www.pravdareport.com/russia/economics/31-01-2017/136748-russia_depopulation-0/

kvs wrote:Russia is affected by a global trend in the developed world which is leading to less marriage and less children being born.
People are living at home longer and not hooking up with a biological partner as much.   So the recovery from the 1990s
crash is frustrated by a longer term dynamical pattern in developed societies.  

Look at Japan, they are closing schools like crazy and (don't laugh) if you watch any of the anime most of it is basically
procreation propaganda.   But as elsewhere the young generation is going its own way.  

The only way the government can really stimulate child "production" is to offset the cost.   Current family friendly tax
measures are token.   There is a need for massive tax breaks (e.g. 50% or more).   Russia is actually in a much better
position to implement such measures because it has a 13% flat tax.   This probably explains why the birth rate has
recovered so much and Russia is actually doing better than other developed countries accounting for immigration.

The reason I don’t write much about Russia’s demographics nowadays is that there isn’t much point to it.

Up until the early 2010s, the Western media was brimming with misinformation about the subject – what we now call #fakenews – so refuting it was both profitable and easy. Incredibly easy. You didn’t really have to do anything much more complicated than taking a few minutes to browse through Russia’s national statistics database, but apparently that was beyond the capabilities of most Russia journalists.

However, by now a critical number of Western pundits have apparently acquainted themselves with at least the Wikipedia article on Russia’s demographics. In the longterm, reality wins out, and so with a lag time of about a decade, references to Russia’s “plummeting population” and “sixth wave of emigration” have steadily petered out (the last major holdouts of Russia demographic doomerism was Barack Obama in this 2014 interview with The Economist, and Michael Rubin for Commentary in 2015,).

We can now finally say that the “Dying Bear” meme has fulfilled lived up to its own name.

***

Anyhow, preliminary demographic results for 2016 are in.

Births remained marginally ahead of deaths, both at around 12.9/1,000 people, though the usual ~300,000 annual net immigrants (almost half of them from Ukraine) will ensure that overall population growth remains decidedly positive.

Births decreased by 2.6%. The full impact of the small 1990s cohort is now being felt, so this was always inevitable. Deaths also declined by 1.2%, despite the ongoing aging of the population. This pretty much completes what I termed The Russian Hexagon, the successor to the so-called “Russian Cross” in the early 1990s when the births and deaths graphs intersected; in the past decade, birth and death rates once again converged, but from the opposite direction, forming a sort of hexagon.

The Total Fertility Rate seems to have stabilized at around 1.75 children per woman (inevitable question: How much without Muslims/ethnic minorities? Approximately 0.1 children less, based on completed fertility data from the 2010 Census).

This makes sense. As I pointed out almost a decade ago, Russian fertility preferences are similar to those of Scandinavians and the Anglosphere (~2.5 children per woman), and higher than that of Visegrad/The Med (~2.1 children) or the Teutonic world (1.7 children), so convergence to at least this level was always on the cards as soon as some semblance of economic stability and predictability was restored.

As I pointed out, this makes Russia’s fertility rates reasonably respectable by European standards; they are only noticeably higher in France, Ireland, the UK, and Sweden.

Life expectancy is now close to 72 years, which is the highest it has ever been in Russia’s history.

One way of looking at this is that mortality trends in Russia are basically tracking improvements in the ex-Soviet Baltics (and the City of Moscow) with a lag of ten years, so there is good reason to expect this trend will continue.

This is primarily linked to the big reduction in vodka bingeing during the past decade, which depressed Russian life expectancy by about a decade relative to what it “should be” based on its GDP per capita and healthcare system. This “alcoholization” began to soar from around 1965, and peaked in the 1990s and early 2000s. According to calculations by the demographer Alexander Nemtsov, something like a third of Russian mortality around 2005 could be attributed to it.

Blast from the Past

Incidentally, back in 2008, I created a demographic model for Russia, which enabled me to accurately predict a resumption in both total (2010) and natural (2013) population growth to the exact year.

In the scenario where TFR is set to a constant 1.75 children per woman, the “Medium” scenario of mortality improvements (which has best tracked Russia’s life expectancy trends to date), and about 300,000 annual immigrants, it predicted the following:

Medium (TFR=1.75 from 2010) The population grows from 2010, rising from 142mn to 148mn in 2025 and 156mn in 2050. The death rate troughs at 10.8 in 2034, before zooming in to 11.5 by 2050. The birth rate peaks at 13.6 by 2014, before plummeting to 9.7 in 2033, before recovering to 11.9 in 2046 and again falling, although less rapidly than before.

How does this stack up against reality? The birth rate reached a multi-year plateau at 13.3 children per woman during 2012-2015, when the decline in the numbers of women of childbearing age were exactly offset by rising total fertility rates. The mortality rate fell steadily throughout this period, just as predicted, though it is marginally higher as of 2016 (12.9/1,000) than in the Medium variant (12.6/1,000).

Overall, this is pretty close, and suggests that the model is fundamentally sound and thus so are its future population projections.

Of course it has to be adjusted upwards by 2.3 million to take into account Crimea, and any further (re)gatherings of rightful Russian clay.


As alcohol abuse fell, so did all of the other components of mortality, especially those most strongly associated with it, i.e. deaths from external causes:

… which includes homicides, suicides, deaths from transport accidents (despite soaring vehicle ownership), and, self-referentially, deaths from alcohol poisoning.

Part of this reduction was due to cultural change, including the realities of life under capitalism (if you turn up to work drunk, you can be fired, unlike under socialism), part of it was due to economics (more diversity of choice), and part of it was thanks to specific Kremlin policies, such as steady increases in the excise tax on alcohol and restrictions on alcohol advertising.

Finally, the abortion rate continues to quietly decline. The ratio of abortions to births is now down to 40%, down from well more than 100% during the era from the post-Stalin legalization of abortion to the 1990s. This is still about 2-3x higher than in most of Western Europe and the US, but Russia is longer the absolute outlier it once was.

Just like the trends with fertility and mortality, this too can be considered a return to “demographic normality” after the Soviet aberration.

One important point: Conservative talking points to the contrary, there is no hard evidence that high abortion rates actually decrease fertility. Low abortion rates are good though for general health reasons and (depending on your religious views) for ethical ones but they have very little to do with demographic health per se.

Even though it completely bans abortions, Poland has one of Europe’s lowest fertility rates. For some reason Mark Steyn never did dwell on that…

It is pointless to make sweeping conclusions based on demographic data from the past one or two months.

That said, the three month moving average has been down relative to the same period in the previous year since the middle of 2016, and as of this year, has widened to 10%, an unprecedented figure in the past decade.

Now to be sure, birth rates should – all else equal – be falling, because the diminished generation of the 1990s is now moving into its peak childbearing years. It shouldn’t be falling by 10% in any one year, however. If this new trend continues, Russia’s TFR for 2017 should fall to about 1.65 children per woman from the 1.76 in 2016.

OTOH mortality continued improving, falling by 1% in the first three months of 2017 relative to same period last year, which translates into a correspondingly greater improvement in life expectancy because of Russia’s ageing population (i.e. for the same reason that Russia’s fertility rate would increase if the number of births was to stay the same).

So I don’t want to imply all is doom and gloom after having covered Russia’s demographic turnaround for almost a decade.

However, it does perhaps warrant a reassessment of the weight we attach to different demographic projections.

For instance, the “Medium” scenario in my Russian demographic model – also the one which I long thought likeliest – involves the assumption that the TFR would converge to about 1.75 (where it has generally been since 2012), with steady convergence in life expectancy to developed world levels, and annual (official) immigrant inflows of 300,000. In this scenario, Russia’s population would actually increase to about 150 million in 2025 and 158 million by 2050 (that’s including Crimea, aka +2 million).

However, if the recent fertility decline is not a one-year blip, and were to instead to continue falling to about 1.50, then Russia’s population would stagnate (this is from before Crimea):

"Low (TFR=1.5 from 2010)Population growth starts from 2011, going from 142mn to 143mn by 2023. Then it falls slowly to 138mn by 2050. The birth rate peaks at 12.5 in 2013, falls sharply to 7.8 by 2032, and then remains in the 8-9 range. The death rate troughs at 11.4 in 2032, then rises to 12.9 by 2050. Positive natural increase is never attained."

Not really the demographic apocalypse long promised by the Western media either, but a disappointing outcome nonetheless.

It’s also possible that this will further encourage the kremlins to intensify immigration from Central Asia.

A rather sharp decrease in the number of births. Dynamics of mortality in this case is the same as in previous years. None of the factors separately (demographic, economic, social) could not give such a result. Since last year greatly decreased the number of marriages (-15%), and this year on the contrary there is a large increase (+10%), apparently it was one of the strongest factors that influenced on the decrease in the number of births. Many couples delayed marriage (for various reasons – such as leap year, problems in the economy) and now of course no children are born, which would have been conceived after the wedding .

On the other hand, recent years have seen a speeding up of the second birth, to receive maternity capital, which could get up to 31 December 2016. The programme is being extended, but many women gave birth to additional children much in advance of the final date 2-3 years ago. And now they are “not enough” in the number of mothers, that is as if they have given birth faster than they should have.

It has generally been expected, but nobody expected such a strong decline. If at least part of these thoughts is correct, it still the 2nd half of 2017 to identify. Need to wait 9 months at least.

AlfaT8 wrote:As i am watching Europe slowly ethnically cleansing themselves of there own ethnic population, i have begun to wonder whether there is a chance that Russia will follow suite in the near future, anybody have any idea?

kvs wrote:

AlfaT8 wrote:As i am watching Europe slowly ethnically cleansing themselves of there own ethnic population, i have begun to wonder whether there is a chance that Russia will follow suite in the near future, anybody have any idea?

You can see he resistance to the political correctness totalitarianism in Poland and Hungary.   They are not abiding by the insane
flooding by hordes of people who resist assimilation.    The EU is trying to punish Poland and Hungary for their sanity.   Russia
is well beyond these "new Europe" countries that are slowly starting to realize that the EUSSR is not all that great.    Russia
is not diseased with political correctness.   It will not parrot insane, self-destructive EU policies since Russia and Russians do
not feel inadequate in the face of NATO and feel no compulsion to mimic the EUSSR.