Paul Goble
Staunton, April 3 – When governments have good news to report about demography or anything else, they celebrate it by issuing the information altogether. When the news is bad or when it reveals serious collateral problems affecting the data, they choose an alternative strategy, putting out the information bit by bit confident that few will take the time to connect the dots.
With regard to the release of initial data from the covid-delayed 2020 Al-Russian census and related demographic information, the Russian government has chosen the latter course, unintentionally highlighting that there are real problems with the data already released and that there are likely to be even more as more information comes out.
This week, Rosstat, the state statistical agency which oversees censuses, said Russia now had a total population of 147 million, a slight increase over the 2010 number. But in announcing it, the agency indicated that the number will have to be corrected and in fact gave two major reasons why (vedomosti.ru/society/articles/2022/04/08/917319-chislo-zhitelei-rossii).
On the one hand, it indicated that there are discrepancies between those counted in a particular region and those present there because residents often move and thus may be counted more than once, something that has the effect of increasing the total by a potentially significant amount.
And on the other, it reported that almost eight million people did not take part in the census at all, either because they couldn’t be contacted or because they refused on religious or other grounds. Since the authorities in fact count them, data for such people are produced from other sources, introducing yet another change in the total count.
These factors are compounded, Rosstat acknowledged, because some census takers had real problems. There are 74 cases in which census volunteers were attacked or threatened with attack and 18 cases where those who were supposed to be counted instead stole the laptop computers of the census takers.
Those figures are not large if they are true, but they indicate real problems with the management of this enumeration.
The census did show some predictable things: Muslim republics led in growth by natural causes, while Moscow led as a result of in-migration (russian7.ru/post/stalo-izvestno-skolko-vsego-chelovek/). The regions with the greatest natural declines, both natural and related to migration were all predominantly ethnic Russian regions (ria.ru/20220404/demografiya-1781577133.html).
Three politically sensitive findings were reported but not highlighted in Moscow reporting. First, cities in the Far North which Putin has wanted to see grow to support his Arctic policies have seen sharp declines (murmanskstat.gks.ru/storage/folder_homepage/2018/12-11/aZHXEKdh/indi/1.pdf).
Second, despite all the controversy about Ufa reidentifying Tatars as Bashkirs, Bashkortostan as a whole rapidly lost population with both birthrate and deathrates becoming worse, the first declining more than expected and the second rising far more rapidly (idel-ural.org/archives/bashkortostan-stremitelno-teryaet-naselenie/).
And third, former Rosstat expert Aleksey Raksha says that the reported populations of the North Caucasus republics are vast exaggerations as officials try to push the numbers up in order to get more money from Moscow (doshdu.com/demograf-realnaja-chislennost-naselenija-ingushetii-pochti-vdvoe-menshe-oficialnyh-cifr/).
Rosstat is reporting that Ingushetia has almost 520,000 residents when in fact local statistics show that the real number is something like 330,000. Daghestan is reporting 600,000 more people than in fact it has. And other republics in the region are similarly exaggerating their numbers.
Moscow might crack down on this, if it were not for one thing: If all the republics of the region did report such overcounts, that would go a long way to explaining why Moscow could claim that the population of the country has increased rather than fallen – especially if some of the overcounts in the North Caucasus are counted again among migrants to Russian cities.
No comments:
Post a Comment