Paul Goble
Staunton, June 15 – A meeting in Kamchatka on the demographic development of the Russian Far East over the next decade highlights two important shifts in Moscow’s approach to that sector, a greater focus on promoting more children in families which already have several and on the federal districts rather than Russia as a whole in designing demographic policies.
Until recently, the Russian government has devoted most of its attention to getting marriage pairs to have children rather than on those with several children to have even more, but now, having discovered that it is easier to get a family with three children to have a fourth, it has been changing its focus.
That is certainly the message the Ninth All-Russian Conference on Demographic Development of the Far East sends. Speakers there talked about increasing family size not from zero to one or two but rather from two and three children to four or more (eastrussia.ru/news/na-kamchatke-obsudili-demograficheskuyu-strategiyu-dfo-do-2036-goda/).
As the participants at this meeting noted, that is what is happening not just in the Russian Far East but in the Russian Federation as a whole, a shift that means some of the financial incentives that Moscow has come up with in the past haven’t been as effective as the center had hoped and are likely to be changed.
The other shift that the Kamchatka meeting marks is the increasing recognition in the center that demographic policy should not reflect a one-size-fits-all approach but rather take regional differences into account, a devolution of decision making from Moscow to the federal districts in one area that could lead to a kind of broader decentralization in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment