30.04.09

In a report on demographic challenges facing Russia, the United Nations predicts that Russia's population will shrink by 26 million to 116 million by 2050. That would bring Russia down from ninth to fourteenth on the ranking of countries with the world's largest populations. Meanwhile, the population of the USA will be four times greater than Russia's in 40 years' time - rising to 404 million (the USA has double Russia's population now - 305 million versus 141.9 million).

Russia's birth rate rose by 1.3% in 2006, 8.7% in 2007, and 6.8% in 2008; but this year it has started falling again. According to the Federal State Statistics Service (RosStat), 270,800 children were born in January and February 2009: 3,700 below the figure for the same period of 2008.

Anatoly Vishnevsky, director of the Demography Institute at the Higher School of Economics, co-authored the UN report. He says that familites have been encouraged by expectations of state grants payable when a child is born. But no amount of state assistance can help raise the birthrate in the future, says Vishnevsky: the number of women of child-bearing age peaked at 40 million in 2002-03, then started falling (to 35 million by 2015).

Vishnevsky adds pessimistically that state assistance can only influence decisions about when to have a child - not decisions on how many children to have.

The working-age population will also shrink: down 14 million by 2025. RosStat Director Vladimir Sokolin says that this figure is already falling by 1 million a year. For this reason, says Vishnevsky, unemployment won't rise as fast - but economic growth will also slow.

The report predicts that by 2050, the number of people in the prime working-age groups will decrease, while the proportion of elderly workers (aged 60-72) will rise from 14% to 23%. In order to solve the problem of the shrinking working-age population, the report proposes using available reserves: encouraging pensioners, the disabled, and young people into the workforce; raising labor productivity; redistributing labor resources. One of the main remedies involves migrants: immigration made up for 46% of Russia's demographic losses in 1992-2007.

However, the crisis makes some measures hard to implement. According to Federal Migration Service Director Konstantin Romodanovsky, the number of immigrants in Russia dropped by 27% in the first quarter of 2009. The government proposes partially compensating for the drop in immigration from abroad by encouraging internal migration: 15,000 Russian citizens will relocate in 2009 according to regional employment support programs.

Translated by InterContact

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Source: "Vedomosti"