Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 16 – Despite some
progress in reducing infant mortality, Russia’s demographic crisis so clearly
on display in the 1990s is resuming not only because of rising mortality rates
among working age people but also because the prime child-bearing cohort of
women is smaller than ever because of super-low birthrates two decades ago.
In what Russian commentator
Yevgeniya Vorobyeva describes as “an echo of the demographic pit of the 1990s,”
the Russian population is set to resume its decline because, even if the
government can push up the birthrate slightly, there are simply far fewer Russian
women to give birth (rusplt.ru/society/eho-demograficheskoy-yamyi-1990h-18324.html).
The
Russian Federation has made genuine progress in reducing infant mortality over
the last several years, she reports, with the number of deaths per thousand
falling from 8.6 per 1,000 live births in 2012 to 6.6 in the first half of 2015,
even though Moscow has now adopted WHO standards that might have been expected
to push the figure up.
Moreover,
she continues, infant mortality has fallen across the country with 55 of the 85
federal subjects reporting declines. What is especially worrisome is that predominantly
ethnic Russian Pskov oblast not only has the highest rate of infant mortality
in the country but has seen its rate from by 86 percent over the last year.
According
to Russian health experts, Vorobyeva says, 40 percent or more of the infant
deaths in Russia are caused by social factors like alcoholism and drug use by
parents or their failure to take their children to doctors or hospitals or to
get required vaccinations.
But “despite
the improvement of birth rates and the reduction of infant mortality, Russia
faces demographic problems in the future,” she points out. The reason is that the number of women
entering the prime child-bearing years will fall by 50 percent over the next
decade. Consequently, even if each were to have more children, the total number
of births would fall.
The
impact of this decline in the number of potential mothers will become visible
already in 2016, Igor Beloborodov, a demographic specialist with the Russian
Institute for Strategic Studies, says. The only reason it hasn’t been as
obvious so far has been that Russians are starting families later than they
were.
Moreover,
he continues, non-Russians had more children in the 1990s than Russians did and
thus have more potential mothers now, along with a higher fertility rate.
However, that means that the ethnic balance will shift against the Russians as
well.
Vorobyev
cites the recent Moscow report, ”Ten Years from Now Will Be Too Late,” to the
effect that “the decline of the birthrate in the 1990s was much larger than
even the demographic pit of World War II. In other words, the number of
Russians not born as a result of the catastrophic decline in births at the end
of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s several times exceeded the number
of Russians not born as a result of World War II.”
“The
generation of the 1990s,” that report continued, “was the smallest in the
post-war period.” Not only did that mean that it would in turn give birth to
fewer children when it came of age, even if birthrates remained the same, but
it has contributed to the aging of the population. Over the last decade, the
number of elderly Russians has gone up by three million.
Another worrisome
problem, Vorboyeva adds, is that mortality among working-age Russians is
rising. In 2014, for example, mortality
rates among Russians aged 30 to 45 went up by 1.2 percent.
Thus, she
concludes, the general demographic picture of the country is not a happy one. “If
the situation doesn’t improve, the country will face problems in economics,
international competitiveness, and over the longer term, in geopolitics as
well.”
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