By Vestnik Kavkaza
The Ministry of Finance proposed the cancelation of the maternity capital program after 2016. At the same time, the vice-premier of Russia Olga Golodets is sure that the government will prolong the program for three years. The program brought positive results. According to the Russian statistics, in six yeasr of realization of the Concept of Demographic Policy, the average birth rate came close to the European level – 1.7 children per woman. At the same time, the level of simple reproduction of the population is 2.15 children per woman.
According to Head of the Department of Health and Population Statistics, Rosstat, Svetlana Nikitina, “Demographic processes in Russia are rather unstable, so we update our predictions every year, and the database at the beginning of each year.”
According to the latest preliminary forecast of the Federal State Statistics Service, the population of Russia could reach 143.4 million people by 2030, i.e. it will remain almost at the current level. “Since 2003 mortality has been decreasing, in fact, for the most long-term period in Russia in the post-war years. For 10 years, life expectancy for men rose by 6 years, for women by 4 years. But we should not overestimate the results, because male life expectancy at birth, and especially when reaching the age of 15 years, i.e. for the adult population, is still lower than in the mid-1960s and in the period of the anti-alcohol campaign. The largest contribution to the increase in life expectancy in recent years is due to the external causes of death and cardiovascular disease. Also, a significant reduction in infant mortality has increased life expectancy for men by 0.4 years and for women by 0.3 years. A significant contribution to the increase in life expectancy due to the reduction of mortality from alcohol poisoning is noteworthy. For men it is 0.4 years, and 0.2 years for women, which of course indicates a significant reduction of the negative impact of alcohol consumption on the mortality rate. The development of health services and the overall level of well-being and the progress of the cultural level, whatever criticism they deserve, put a limit on the worsening of the situation,” Nikitina says.
At the same time, the inflow of migrants is an important demographic factor. “Projections on migration are the least defined, as they depend not only on the socio-economic situation in Russia but also on the situation in the post- Soviet space and beyond. Migration growth in Russia in recent years has fluctuated quite substantially, the migration rate changes from 70,000 to 300,000 a year. Therefore, it determines a fairly wide spread of hypotheses about the number of migrants coming to Russia.
In the low variant we assume a reduction of migration growth in the coming years up to 250-200 thousand, this scenario may correspond to the conservation of the current immigration policy, when the conditions are created for limited groups of migrants, i.e. for compatriots living abroad and family members of Russian citizens.
The high immigration rate option can be provided by an increase in migration to 500 thousand. This can be facilitated by growth of the Russian economy, the need for additional labour force in the conditions of a strong decline in the population of working age, which has been intensifying. Then the immigration policy will be more focused on the development of permanent migration programs, creation of opportunities to gain permanent residency status for temporary labor migrants who have been legally working in Russian for a long time. The middle option is the arithmetic mean and corresponds to the target reference points of the "Conception of Demographic Policy of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2025. "It's 300 million migrants per year.
In the last two years we have exactly this number of migrants. If in 2012 we had 294,000 migrants, in 2011 it was 320,000” Nikitina says.
