Russia

Understanding Migration in Russia

Searching for more information on migration and the CIS I found this useful paper, which I thought I would draw to people's attention:

Understanding Migration in Russia
A policy note
by Yuri Andrienko and Sergei Guriev
Center for Economic and Financial Research at New Economic School
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The demise of Russia's far east

The Demography.Matters team has on several occasions reported on the demographics of Russia and this time around we look at the differences between east and west of the large country. At first hand, it seems as if the demographic issues in Russia could be narrated in a general sense.

'For more than a decade, the country's population has steadily shrunk from 150 million in the early 1990s to just more than 140 million today. According to official statistics, unless the situation changes, the Russian population will drop to 80 million by 2050, leaving the country's Far East virtually vacant.'
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Johnson's Russia List

Johnson's Russia List have a very interesting population thread which is here. Population is now falling and life expectancy has been reducing dramatically:

Glowing economic statistics show that Russia is in the midst of an oil-fueled boom, but the life expectancy of its citizens remained woefully low, the nation's top statistician said Tuesday......... Russia's population dropped by 0.5 percent, or 680,000 people, to 142.8 million last year, Sokolin (head of the Federal State Statistics Service) said. And the average life span of the Russian male is now just 58 the level to which it dropped in the social turmoil that followed the default just over seven years ago. "Nothing has changed with regard to life expectancy,"
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Russians just don´t want to live

Most Russians still don´t lead a happy life. At least that goes for Russians males in particular according to a Worldbank report "Dying too Young".
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Islam in Russia: Evolution in action?

Last month, The Globe and Mail of Toronto published a series of five reports by Graeme Smith, "Russia Shrinks", devoted to an examination of some of the demographic dynamics at work in the present Russian Federation: the high death rate, the suspicions of Chinese immigration, most worryingly the growth of violent racist youth gangs and paramilitaries. Smith's report of the 25th, the article "Tensions rise in Lenin's hometown" was particularly interesting, examining the growth of Christian-Muslim tensions across Russia through the prism of events in Ulyvanosk Oblast.
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Russian Demographics at a Glance

This one actually belongs over at Demography.Matters but since there are so many interesting posts up and running over there at the moment I thought I would use Alpha.Sources as a venue of the tale of the sorry state of Russian demographics. I have reported before on this over at DM invoking The Demise of Russia's Far East. This time I am looking at the country as a whole and my source is an article in the recent edition of the Economist print edition which paints a telling picture of a country with serious demographic issues.
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Demography In Davos

As Claus notes on his own blog, demography actually hit the agenda at the Davos World Economic Forum this year. And as Alex on Afoe also points out some of “the world’s most important bloggers” were even invited to boot, though not, of course, Claus and I: next year perhaps :).

Nonetheless it is significant that the topic is now making it onto the agenda, and of course, where there is still life there is still hope.

Perhaps the most serious topic to get an airing was the state of play in the ex-USSR
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