The birth rate in Russia increases

By Vestnik Kavkaza

The scandalous Dima Yakovlyev Law which has a lot of supporters and opponents was surprisingly supported by demographists. Commenting the law, Igor Beloborodov, director of the Institute for Demographic Research, stated that “dozens of thousands of children are being raised in foreign families. We are losing not a certain person, but the whole family. We are losing his descendants, his wife. The potential is not ours.”

Demographic problems are acute for Russia. The birth rate in Russia was  17.7%, but in Georgia there is 25%. “Although there was no maternity capital, there were little different appeals that affected the Georgian mentality. Patriarch Ilia II, who means a lot to Georgians and their unity, made an appeal to the nation in 2007, and said: "I will baptize every third child". It is believed that this call worked: it halved the number of abortions, and actually increased fertility. This still requires the test of time. 

Only four regions in Russia had a change of generations, when the fertility rate exceeded the required threshold, the renowned 2:1 - these were Chechnya, Ingushetia, The Republic of Tuva and the Altai Republic. If you look at the data on the age-old Slavic regions, I mean the core of the Russian state, which includes the Voronezh, Yaroslavl, Tula, Tver and Ivanovo regions, we will get a decline of more than 90 thousand people from January to October. 

The age model of fertility has also changed, because the dividend we had from the end of the 1980s, when there was a known surge of births, is gradually exhausted, and the only thing holding it back and prolonging its action is the fact that women give birth a little bit later now. 

Another very important fact is migrants. After all, the huge avalanche of migration is not reflected anywhere in the statistics, as if these people do not exist. According to some Moscow maternity homes, 30% of births in some institutions of obstetrics are down to migrants, and they, too, contribute to the final fertility count. 

If we take the inflow of the culturally-close Moldovans and Ukrainians, there are no integration problems, but if we look how the interethnic situation has been changed in the last 20 years, which are characterized by migratory inflows, including from the republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia, not everyone is optimistic about this. 

As for the issue of aging, it should be noted that of the 10 most aging countries in the world, nine are in Europe, and only one of them is in Asia - this is Japan. Perhaps only one thing does not allow Russia, Ukraine and Moldova to be listed here - this is the fact that our life expectancy is not so great as, for example, even in neighboring Latvia, which closes this list,” Beloborodov says.

According to Vladimir Arkhangelski, a leading researcher at the Center for the Study of Population of the Department of Economics of Moscow State University, now people of the age of 65 years are those who were born after the war, a very large generation, the so-called post-war compensation increase in fertility. “And so population aging will inevitably intensify, we must be ready for it from the point of view of the economy, social services, pensions, medicine. The only humane way to slow it down is to increase the number of children, teenagers, young people, and here, too, the only way  to do this is to increase the birthrate.”

“In Russia the increase in the birth rate in 2007 was only related to second and subsequent births, because the greatest public attention was drawn to maternity capital, and this is granted from the second birth in the family. This measure was, in my opinion, the most effective in terms of its impact on people's minds. This increase in the birthrate continued until 2012 - even though there is still no final data for the year, but we can say that the birth rate in Russia has continued to rise in 2012. But the rise in general has slowed down, i.e. the effect of these measures is fading. We need, apparently, new measures.”

Another reduction in mortality in Russia began in 2006. “There are some waves - we have alternating decreases and increases. It would be desirable that the tendency which began in 2006 proved to be quite stable, because we are lagging behind the developed countries in mortality rate very seriously,” Arkhangelski thinks. 

“The prospects of the birth rate and the mortality rate will depend on the type of population policy, but a very significant impact will be provided by the structure of the population, and here we are, perhaps, doomed. The number of 15-19-year old girls is now less than half of today's 25 to 29-year-old women. After 10 years they will replace them. Therefore we are unlikely to stay at the level of the natural growth of the population which was achieved in 2012.”