Russia's demographic profile since the dissolution of the Soviet Union has been notoriously grim, with terrifically high mortality combining with terribly low birth rates to produce a rate of natural decrease that even considerable immigration couldn't compensate for. Until now.
Russia has registered the first population increase since the chaotic years which followed the fall of the Soviet Union, bucking a long-term decline that has dampened economic growth projections, officials said on Tuesday.
Russia's population increased by between 15,000 and 25,000 to more than 141.9 million in 2009, the first annual increase since 1995, Health Minister Tatyana Golikova told a meeting in the Kremlin with President Dmitry Medvedev.
The rise was helped by a 4 percent decline in mortality rates and an influx of immigrants, mostly from the former republics of the former Soviet Union, Golikova said.
"The difference between birth rates and mortality rates will be covered by a rise in migration," Golikova said in a televised Kremlin meeting, adding that Russia was trying to cut the number of abortions.
"Our abortion rates are comparable to birth rates," she said. Russia registered 1.7 million births in 2009 and 1.2 million abortions.
In addition, as the Population Reference Bureau's Carl Haub noted, births have risen even as mortality has fallen.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has long advocated a rise in Russia’s very low birth rate. In 2007, with his bidding, the government took the dramatic step of providing women with a $9,000 payment for the birth of a second child. The incentive certainly seems to have worked. In 2007, births jumped nearly 9 percent over 2006 and, in 2008, by 6.4 percent over 2007. Russia’s total fertility rate (TFR) now stands at 1.49 (2008), up from its nadir of 1.16 in 1999.
[. . .]
Official demographic data have been released by the state statistical bureau, GOSKOMSTAT, for January 2009 through November (Russia releases vital statistics very quickly). Those show an increase in births for the January-November 2009 period of 2.8 percent, lower than the previous two years but still an increase. At the same time, deaths dropped by 3.7 percent so that natural decrease, birth minus deaths, was “only” -224,310. I say only because that figure was an astounding -958,000 in 2000. So for population to grow in 2009, net international migration will have to offset that -224,310. That certainly seems to be well within reach since net immigration from January to October was reported as 210,446, much of it from Central Asia and other former Soviet republics which the Russians often refer to as the “near abroad.” Based on typical migration patterns in Russia in November and December, about 250,000 net immigration can be expected.
Russia has thus moved into the territory of countries like Germany, Spain, or Italy, where natural decrease in the native-born population is countered by immigration. This is a good thing.
Will this last? Almost certainly not. Leaving aside the possibility that the cash payments, instead of encouraging women to be mothers to more children, actually encouraged them to have the children they were planning on having early, the birth rate's increase is the product of the women born in the last two decades of the Soviet Union. As this 1996 RAND survey points out, well into the 1980s the population of the modern-day Russian Federation exhibited TFRs well in excess of western Europe, hovering around replacement. The fall of the Soviet Union led to a sharp fall in birth rates and this, noted in the St. Petersburg Times, has sharply reduced the numbers of potential mothers.
The number of children under 18 has fallen to 26.5 million now from 38 million in 1995 and 33.5 million in 2000, according to a new report by UNICEF and the State Statistics Service.
“For historical and demographic reasons, the child population in Russia decreased by approximately 12 million over the last 13 years. This is an average of 1 million each year,” said Bertrand Bainvel, UNICEF’s representative in Russia.
“This in itself poses important development challenges, and optimizing the investment in childhood makes it even more important and urgent for the country,” he told The St. Petersburg Times.
[. . .]
“There were a lot of babies born in the 1980s but few in the 1990s, and now we can see the result of the decline,” said Anatoly Vishnevsky, head of the Demography Institute at the Higher School of Economics.
“Later the birth rate started to increase, but not by much,” he added.
Since the number of children is now low, the birth rate will not be able to increase for the next two decades, he said.
“The number of children might increase, but not significantly,” Vishnevsky said, adding that there will not be enough women for reproduction.
The effect, Haub notes, is extreme.
Russia’s age-sex pyramid took a body blow during the period of high natural decrease. The number of young people moving up the age ladder into the prime childbearing ages is much less than those now in the childbearing years. As of January 1, 2009, there were 6.2 million females in the age group 20-24. The 15-19 age group was only 4.5 million and both the 5-9 and 10-14 age groups taken together totaled 6.5 million. As those younger age groups begin childbearing, births will certainly decline even if the TFR rises. Beyond that, deaths will rise as the elderly population grows significantly in size.
This drop has had a dramatic effect already, on the size of student populations for instance.
While the number of first graders rose from 1.25 million in 2007 to 1.39 million in 2009 — the first increase in 12 years in 2009 — the overall number of high school students almost halved from 20.6 million in 1998 to 13.3 million last year.
The number of high school graduates fell from 1.25 million in 1998 to 900,000 in 2009 and is expected to drop to 700,000 in 2012.
As a consequence, university student numbers are expected to drop from the current 7.5 million to 4 million in the 2012-13 school year.
There just aren't enough Russian women to compensate for this shortfall. Accordingly, Russia's population will soon resume its natural decrease, if at a gentler pace than in the bad days of old. If: There's no telling what migration would do to complicate matters. If Russia stopped attracting immigrants and instead became a major source of immigrants, things could change sharply for the worse.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Friday, January 29, 2010
A few links
Hi, everyone! My apologies for taking this much time off. While I generate some actual content, here's a few links for you to peruse!
The Toronto Star reports that many displaced people from Port-au-Prince have found refuge in Haiti's smaller towns and cities.
At the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin reproduces economist Paul Romer's argument that Haitians should be helped by letting them immigrate to countries where they will able to prosper, instead of forcing them to stay in their impoverished country while hoping for massive political and economic improvements that may well not come.
Elliott Abrams makes a similar argument in the Washington Post, arguing that a much larger Haitian diaspora would be able to send more remittances back to Haiti, thus helping the Haitian economy.
The Inter Press Service reports that high rates of poverty have made most of Nicaragua's young want to emigrate, joing a diaspora amounting to 13% of Nicaragua's 5.5 million.
Yabiladi.com reports that a tenth of Italy's foreigners are Moroccan.
The New Straits Times's Chi Mei Ling writes about the vast improvements in opportunities that migrants to richer countries could enjoy, and argues that some countries--Malaysia is specifically raised--could do a better job of enabling this improvement.
The New York Times takes a look at the controversial nature of daycare and the all-day school system in Germany, steps towards more equal labour-sharing within the household and greater opportunities for women, part of an effort towards boosting cohort fertility. Interestingly enough, East German women raised with the GDR's tradition of female daycare and high rates of female participation in the labour force are wondering why it took West German women so long.
Radio Australia describes a major problem facing foreign immigrants in Japan when it notes that out of one thousand nursing applicants from Indonesia and the Philippines, "30 were able to qualify for training in Japan, and of those, just five passed the national exam, giving them the right to work as nurses." Mastering the Japanese language, especially all three of its scripts, was a major problem; without the language, they couldn't get in.
In Canada's, the population of the province of Saskatchewan--recently a net exporter of immigrants--has grown as economic opportunities have improved.
The Latin American Herald Tribune notes that Chile's birth rate has fallen by more than half since 1950, from "an average of five children each in 1950 to fewer than two apiece in 2007" to a current TFR of 1.8.
The Inter Press Service's Chen Siwu and Li Yahong describe the provinces of China's "ant tribe," the well-educated young Chinese who have difficulties finding a job.
People in Mali are organizing to help and protect the sizable Malien labour diaspora in Europe, especially in France, lobbying for the regularization of this diaspora's members and helping Maliens deported back to their country.
Taiwan News notes the correspondence between Taiwanese women's low participation in Taiwan's labour force and the island nation's low cohort fertility.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Why Haitians are not going to go to Senegal
This news item certainly raised some eyebrows.
Senegal is offering free land to Haitians wishing to "return to their origins" following this week's devastating earthquake, which has destroyed the capital and buried thousands of people beneath rubble.
Senegal's octogenarian President Abdoulaye Wade told a meeting of his advisers that Haitians are the sons and daughters of Africa, because the country was founded by slaves, including some believed to have come from Senegal.
"The president is offering voluntary repatriation to any Haitian that wants to return to their origin," said Wade's spokesman Mamadou Bemba Ndiaye late Saturday following the president's announcement.
"Senegal is ready to offer them parcels of land - even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it's just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region," he said.
He stressed that Wade had insisted that if a region is handed over it should be in a fertile area - not in the country's parched deserts.
Waye even went so far as to proposed the creation Haitian homeland in the African continent, on the grounds that these members of the African diaspora deserved an African home.
Waye's remarkable proposals were motivated by pan-Africanism and by a belief in the real existence of an African diaspora, created by the forced migration of millions of slaves from the African continent mainly to the Americas but also to the Arab world, eventually forming small minorities in some countries (United States, Mexico, Argentina), pluralities or even majorities in others (Brazil and Cuba in particular), or overwhelming majorities in others, as in Haiti and most of the other island societies of the Caribbean. This sentiment played a non-trivial role in Africa, with resettled slaves creating Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries, Marcus Garvey and many other black intellectuals and politicians in North America and the Caribbean advocating pan-African sentiments, and several of the independent states produced by decolonization actively trying to encourage the return of members of the diaspora, as in Ghana.
The Castle of St. George d'Elmina and other infamous abodes of the "doors of no return" mark the paths of slaves destined for the Americas. The current Ghanaian government has swung these "doors" back open, hoping to persuade American and Caribbean descendents of the slave trade to live in Ghana.
Meanwhile, Ghanaian citizens continue to emigrate to North America, Europe, and other parts of Africa. The economic, political, and social woes of the past three decades have created a new diaspora of Ghanaians searching for opportunities elsewhere. As a result, Ghana is often highlighted as a nation struggling with the effects of brain drain.
This sentiment continues, with the African Union trying to actively involve members of the African diaspora in its affairs and the growth of lobbies in the diaspora (TransAfrica's opposition to South African apartheid being a case in point). Ghanaian journalist Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr. applauded Senegal's proposals, contrasting it unfavourably to Ghana's position.
In any case, whether the most expedient thing to do is for many an emotionally devastated and psychologically traumatized Haitian to simply jump aboard the next flight from Port-au-Prince or mount the deck of the next ship to weigh anchor at Port-au-Prince, no pun is intended here, of course, and literally abandon the virtual shipwreck that is present-day Haiti, after some three- to four-hundred years of staking up domestic existence in the erstwhile Hispaniola, is really beside the point. What matters more than all else is the prompt and timely demonstration of great and enviable leadership such as admirably exhibited by Mr. Wade at Haiti’s most vulnerable and desperate moment.
In making his landmark offer, President Abdoulaye Wade made it pointedly clear that his was not simply a humanitarian gesture for which Haitians needed to be eternally grateful but, rather, one that was logically and immutably dictated by historical reality: “Haitians are sons and daughters of Africa[,] since Haiti was founded by slaves, including some [who are] thought to [have hailed] from Senegal.”
Needless to say, Mr. Wade clearly appears to have been fully aware of the fact of the bulk of the ancestors of modern Haitians having originated largely from between Eastern Volta and Western Niger. Still, for the erudite Senegalese premier, an African identity is decidedly more of a corporate, or collective, feature than being merely a topical or geographically parochial phenomenon. Such inclusive stance is no happenstance at all, coming from a bona fide native of the land and nation that produced such intellectual and cultural giants as Messrs. Cheikh Anta Diop, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Alioune Diop and Sembene Ousman.
The major problem with all this in terms of migration to the African continent, apart from the very salient fact that "black" identity is an exceptionally amorphous thing with potentially very little or no relevance to the people whose allegiances it claims and the reality that "African diaspora" as a catch-all term actually effaces the very real fact of multiple stronger diasporic identities under its aegi, is that there's no economic incentive for Haitians to go there. According to 2007 data, Haiti ranks 149th in the world on the Human Development Index with a rating of 0.532. Senegal, one of West Africa's most developed countries, ranks 166th with a HDI of 0.484. Notwithstanding Senegal's somewhat greater income, this will not create a significant Haitian movement to Africa, especially with much closer and richer potential destinations like the United States and Canada. Besides, this kind of sentiment tends to not amount to anything serious--pan-African sentiments certainly haven't improved the reception given to migrants from the Sahel to coastal West Africa. Waye's proposals have been generally criticized by Senegalese and so, partially retracted.
Senegal is offering free land to Haitians wishing to "return to their origins" following this week's devastating earthquake, which has destroyed the capital and buried thousands of people beneath rubble.
Senegal's octogenarian President Abdoulaye Wade told a meeting of his advisers that Haitians are the sons and daughters of Africa, because the country was founded by slaves, including some believed to have come from Senegal.
"The president is offering voluntary repatriation to any Haitian that wants to return to their origin," said Wade's spokesman Mamadou Bemba Ndiaye late Saturday following the president's announcement.
"Senegal is ready to offer them parcels of land - even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it's just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region," he said.
He stressed that Wade had insisted that if a region is handed over it should be in a fertile area - not in the country's parched deserts.
Waye even went so far as to proposed the creation Haitian homeland in the African continent, on the grounds that these members of the African diaspora deserved an African home.
Waye's remarkable proposals were motivated by pan-Africanism and by a belief in the real existence of an African diaspora, created by the forced migration of millions of slaves from the African continent mainly to the Americas but also to the Arab world, eventually forming small minorities in some countries (United States, Mexico, Argentina), pluralities or even majorities in others (Brazil and Cuba in particular), or overwhelming majorities in others, as in Haiti and most of the other island societies of the Caribbean. This sentiment played a non-trivial role in Africa, with resettled slaves creating Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 18th and 19th centuries, Marcus Garvey and many other black intellectuals and politicians in North America and the Caribbean advocating pan-African sentiments, and several of the independent states produced by decolonization actively trying to encourage the return of members of the diaspora, as in Ghana.
The Castle of St. George d'Elmina and other infamous abodes of the "doors of no return" mark the paths of slaves destined for the Americas. The current Ghanaian government has swung these "doors" back open, hoping to persuade American and Caribbean descendents of the slave trade to live in Ghana.
Meanwhile, Ghanaian citizens continue to emigrate to North America, Europe, and other parts of Africa. The economic, political, and social woes of the past three decades have created a new diaspora of Ghanaians searching for opportunities elsewhere. As a result, Ghana is often highlighted as a nation struggling with the effects of brain drain.
This sentiment continues, with the African Union trying to actively involve members of the African diaspora in its affairs and the growth of lobbies in the diaspora (TransAfrica's opposition to South African apartheid being a case in point). Ghanaian journalist Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr. applauded Senegal's proposals, contrasting it unfavourably to Ghana's position.
In any case, whether the most expedient thing to do is for many an emotionally devastated and psychologically traumatized Haitian to simply jump aboard the next flight from Port-au-Prince or mount the deck of the next ship to weigh anchor at Port-au-Prince, no pun is intended here, of course, and literally abandon the virtual shipwreck that is present-day Haiti, after some three- to four-hundred years of staking up domestic existence in the erstwhile Hispaniola, is really beside the point. What matters more than all else is the prompt and timely demonstration of great and enviable leadership such as admirably exhibited by Mr. Wade at Haiti’s most vulnerable and desperate moment.
In making his landmark offer, President Abdoulaye Wade made it pointedly clear that his was not simply a humanitarian gesture for which Haitians needed to be eternally grateful but, rather, one that was logically and immutably dictated by historical reality: “Haitians are sons and daughters of Africa[,] since Haiti was founded by slaves, including some [who are] thought to [have hailed] from Senegal.”
Needless to say, Mr. Wade clearly appears to have been fully aware of the fact of the bulk of the ancestors of modern Haitians having originated largely from between Eastern Volta and Western Niger. Still, for the erudite Senegalese premier, an African identity is decidedly more of a corporate, or collective, feature than being merely a topical or geographically parochial phenomenon. Such inclusive stance is no happenstance at all, coming from a bona fide native of the land and nation that produced such intellectual and cultural giants as Messrs. Cheikh Anta Diop, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Alioune Diop and Sembene Ousman.
The major problem with all this in terms of migration to the African continent, apart from the very salient fact that "black" identity is an exceptionally amorphous thing with potentially very little or no relevance to the people whose allegiances it claims and the reality that "African diaspora" as a catch-all term actually effaces the very real fact of multiple stronger diasporic identities under its aegi, is that there's no economic incentive for Haitians to go there. According to 2007 data, Haiti ranks 149th in the world on the Human Development Index with a rating of 0.532. Senegal, one of West Africa's most developed countries, ranks 166th with a HDI of 0.484. Notwithstanding Senegal's somewhat greater income, this will not create a significant Haitian movement to Africa, especially with much closer and richer potential destinations like the United States and Canada. Besides, this kind of sentiment tends to not amount to anything serious--pan-African sentiments certainly haven't improved the reception given to migrants from the Sahel to coastal West Africa. Waye's proposals have been generally criticized by Senegalese and so, partially retracted.
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