Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 3 – Despite progress
since 2005 when more than half of working-age Russian men died before reaching retirement,
30 percent of 18-year-old Russian men today will still die before then,
three times the rate of men in Muslim Albania and a trend that may be reversed
by Moscow’s mistaken policies on alcohol prices and taxes.
Yesterday, the Russian health
ministry said mortality rates among Russian adults had fallen 2.1 percent over
the last year, with the figure falling from 545.5 deaths per 100,000 population
to 534.3. It noted that these rates had
declined by 35.3 percent over the last decade (rosminzdrav.ru/news/2015/09/02/2519-soobschenie-minzdrava-rossii-o-snizhenii-smertnosti-za-pervoe-polugodie-2015-goda).
Despite
this progress, Russia had and has a very high rate of morality among
working-age males compared to other countries, largely as a result of alcohol
consumption, according to Andrey Korotayev, a demographer at the Russian
Academy of Economics and State Service (polit.ru/article/2015/09/03/utro_02_09/).
The demographer points out noted
that Albania, whose Muslim population has no tradition of drinking, has very
low mortality among its working-age population. Only about 10 percent of its
adult males die between 18 and 65 while somewhere around 30 percent of
working-age Russian men still do.
Russia’s progress over the last decade,
Korotayev says, has been “colossal,” an achievement he said had been possible
thanks to increasing restrictions on alcohol consumption. But that in turn means that any loosening of
those restrictions threatens to send adult male mortality rates back up.
He predicts that “mortality among
the working-age population should increase” because the government chose not to
raise taxes on alcohol and because since these taxes are not adjusted for
inflation, price rises mean that the impact of taxes on overall alcohol prices
and thus on consumption in fact is falling. The more inflation there is, the
greater the impact of this factor.
Korotayev also says that some of the
year-to-year progress the health ministry reported was a statistical quirk
reflecting changes in alcohol policies last year. If one looks month by month, he says,
mortality from alcohol-related causes went up two percent in February, 7.5
percent in May, “but in July there was a certain reduction which gave the not
bad figures.”
If one plugs all these figures into
existing models and if there are no policy changes, then, “working-age
mortality especially among men will stop its decline” and by the end of the year,
“one can expect that mortality will be higher than it was a year ago.”
There are ways to prevent that, he
says. Indexing alcohol taxes to inflation rather than tying them to alcohol
volume as now and eliminating the government’s recent reduction in the minimum
price for alcohol would all have positive effects. But “if these measures aren’t
taken,” mortality rates are going to go back up, particularly among working-age
Russian men.
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