Uzbekistan Fertility and Migration

As should be evident from the last post, Claus and I have really been pretty shocked by the rapidity with which labour market tightening has been emerging in Eastern Europe recently. As Claus noted, this recognition lead me to take the Economist quite sharply to task on Afoe, and at least I managed to sting a response from their Central European correspondent Edward Lucas, who, as Claus would tell us, is far from being a worst case example of benign neglect here, in fact, in general terms, au contraire.

Ultimately this labour shortage situation is rooted in the longer term consequences of an ongoing combination of low fertility and outward migration towards Western Europe and beyond. The arrival of the "running on empty" situation is proving to be very rapid due to the extremely high rates of economic "catch-up" growth which these countries economies are now experiencing. And the problem is really starting to hit them now precisely because the annual number of children born in many of the countries concerned halved in or around 1990, and thus it is very hard to see how they are collectively going to have an adequate number of labour market entrants in the younger age groups in the coming years. And this, as we are already seeing in the Latvian case, is surely going to present a major inflation problem, if nothing worse.

When I say shocked, I really mean it. It is evident that both Claus and I consider demography to be far more important to economic processes than most economists accept, and we have been thinking hard and long about the implications of changing demography, so if all of this is taking even us by surprise you can imagine where that may leave everyone else.

Now in order to try and pin things down a bit more clearly, we are digging around trying to get some sort of measure of what is actually happening in each of the countries concerned. As Claus pointed out in this post on the World Bank remittances report last year, Russia is now totally dependent on inward migration from the CIS states, to the tune of possibly over a million people a year. This is needed simply to sustain ongoing growth there, given their own out-migration and the rate of economic growth that is being driven by the surge in oil prices. So we need to check and look at just how long Russia can expect to be receiving migrants at this sort of rate.

One of the obvious source countries is Uzbekistan (current population approximately 28 million). Now in 2006, according to Moscow News, a total of 500,000 Uzbek migrants went to work in Russia. And according to the same article, Uzebekistan only came in at third place as a migrant supplier:

Konstantin Romodanovsky the head of Russia's migration service said Uzbekistan is the third-largest source of migrant labor to Russia (sharing third place with Tajikistan), after Ukraine and Kazakhstan, with a total of 500,000 Uzbek workers coming to Russia in 2006.

So Uzbekistan is losing workers rapidly, too rapidly for a country of only 28 million.

And what about the replacement labour supply, ie fertility. Well this is now declining fast, and, according to this useful ppt, rapidly reaching the critical replacement level, below which it will doubtless then inevitably plunge. The data presented by David Clifford in the presentation go as follows:

Total Fertility Rate:

5.7 mid-1970s (Karimov et al. 1997)
4.07 in 1990 (UNICEF TransMONEE)
3.3 in 1994-1996 (Kuzibaeva 2001)
2.9 in 2000-2002 (Kamilov et al. 2004)
2.36 in 2003 (UNICEF TransMONEE)

It should be pointed out that this is "grouped" data, coming from a variety of different sources. So it is not a precise indicator, but it does show the clear trend.

It is also important to note that this fall is all occuring as part of the first stage of the demographic transition - ie before the progression from ‘stopping sooner’ to ‘starting later’ as the mechanism of decline - since this fall infertility in Uzbekistan has been achieved without any significant upward movement in first birth ages. Thus postponement is still to come. Bottom line, fertility in Uzbekistan is about to fall into the lowest-low category, and is likely to stay there for many years to come. Which means that 10 years from now Uzbekistan is going to have problems supplying its own labour market needs, let alone supplying extensive and ongoing immigration to anyone.

Update

Well the Uzbek economy was growing at a 9% annual rate in Q1 2007, according to this link. The IMF is apparently happy with them. Remittances are now running at a rate of about bout $500 million annually, which will speed up internal development no end. Now none of this means that emigration will dry up tomorrow, but it does put an outer limit to the process, and that outer limit will evidently be hit a lot sooner than the World Banks and others imagine.

Also I found this link from the Institute for War and Peace which gives some indication of the extent of the problems which are arising. You can already find statements like "“The country has villages where there is no one left to carry the coffin when someone dies. Old men and women have to do it because there are no young men there – they’ve all left.”, which is very reminiscent of the sorts of comments we have seen coming from rural Latvia in recent years. How big is the outflow problem in Uzebekistan? As I say above, this is very hard to get to grips with since so many migrants are either "illegals" or "seasonal workers". Huge discrepencies exist in the numbers, but looking at what we have seen in the East-west European flows we might well conclude that though the numbers are well below the most exagerrated figures being bandied about, they are nonetheless large and significant:

The authorities in Uzbekistan are trying to gather more information about the hundreds of thousands of people who work as migrant labour abroad. Officially, a new registration system is intended to make it easier to help migrants if they get into trouble, but many believe the government is concerned about the exodus of its adult workforce and wants to stem the flow. Other reasons for keeping tabs on Uzbek citizens abroad are to exert the same kind of political control as they are subject to at home, and also to recover some of the taxes they would have paid if they stayed in Uzbekistan. A government order dated May 15 has two stated aims – to streamline the registration procedures that would-be migrant workers must go through, and to ensure they are protected once they are out of the country.

Under the new rules, Uzbek nationals planning to leave the country have to fill in a form stating details of their future job and whereabouts. This is a revised version of a document already in existence, although IWPR understands that most people who went through the procedure before the change were travelling to countries outside the former Soviet Union......Low salaries and scant job opportunities force many in Uzbekistan to leave the country in search of work. Information from various official sources indicate that around 800,000 people work outside the country – a massive 10 per cent of the total working population. Other estimates put the figure at three million, while some regime insiders say it could be up to five or six million. The discrepancy is partly attributable to the difficulty of counting migrants, not least because many are “illegals”, and because of seasonal variations in the numbers. Another factor is that for a government which claims economic successes year after year, it is somewhat embarrassing if a major part of the workforce is voting with its feet.To get a better idea of the figures involved, the government’s statistical agency and the customs committee have been instructed to produce quarterly reports on the number of people moving abroad and their reasons for leaving. Uzbek consulates abroad are also to monitor people’s movements.

On another front, as has emerged in the comments section the Russophone stock in countries like Uzbekistan is being rapidly depleted, with the consequence that the ethnic composition of the flows is changing. This is predictably provoking a sharp change in reactions back home in "Mother Russia". One illustration would be the recent demands coming from the Moscow municipal authorities to restrict inward migration, or another would be this piece in the St Petersburg Times about the demographic future and "ethnic composition" of the city.


References

Stopping sooner or starting late? Fertility decline in Uzbekistan
Presentation by David Clifford
Social Statistics, University of Southampton

Kuzibaeva, G. (2001) Fertility transition in Uzbekistan: demographic trends and reproductive health policy, Central Asia Monitor 2001(2).

Karimov, S I, Akhror B Yarkulov and Asadov D A (1997) Fertility, in Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology [Uzbekistan] and Macro International Inc. Uzbekistan Demographic and Health Survey, 1996. Calverton, Maryland: Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and Macro International Inc, pp.35-45.

Kamilov A I, Sullivan J and Mutalova Z D (2004) Fertility, Chapter 4 in Uzbekistan Health Examination Survey 2002. Calverton, Maryland, USA: Analytical and Information Center, State Department of Statistics, and ORC Macro.

UNICEF (2005) TransMONEE Database, UNICEF IRC, Florence.