Putin announced a demographic decline. State programs to support families will not quickly affect the birth rate - demographer

At the annual “Direct Line”, Vladimir Putin once again stated that Russia is facing serious demographic challenges. According to him, the birth rate in the country has dropped to 1.41%, and for natural population growth this figure needs to be raised to at least 2.1%. However, in some countries the situation with the birth rate is even worse than in Russia, he claims: “We are even better than in Finland, Spain, Japan and South Korea.”

Putin made a mistake with the percentages; the birth rate is a dimensionless quantity. 1.41, for example, means that on average there are 1.41 new children per woman during her reproductive years.

Putin spoke vaguely about the reasons for the decline in the birth rate, talking about difficult trials and saying that it works differently in different years. He gave examples of the decline in the birth rate during the Great Patriotic War and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“It’s like a sine wave, everything continues. And we have difficult trials. In our country, you know, the number of women of childbearing age has decreased by 30%. Girls are needed. Girls. But what are we doing to improve the situation? Well, this whole program has been created. We do this all the time... I would like to appeal to all leaders of all constituent entities of the Russian Federation. This is where the working day should begin and end,” he said.

Speaking about sinusoids, Putin probably meant the graphs that demographers build to explain the situation with the decline in the birth rate. Since World War II, population and birth rates have been skewed: a large generation replaces a small one. Demographers represent this as a sine wave - a graph with waves. The sharp declines that began after the Second World War will continue regardless of demographic policy, independent demographer Alexey Raksha explained to the BBC.

“Since the Great Patriotic War, the sinusoid should have died out long ago and become invisible. But every time this sinusoid declines, some independent bad events occur that reduce the birth rate. And as the sinusoid grows, either nothing bad happens, or a good event occurs. So the boat keeps rocking. Just as the wave was receding, the crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s occurred—few children were born then. As a result, the “demographic wave” not only did not disappear, but also intensified and prolonged. Moreover, now this influence will be traced for several generations. From 2010 to 2030, the number of women of childbearing age will decline by 40% because they were not born in the 1990s,” he explained.

To correct the situation, Russia has programs to support families, Putin recalled during the direct line: a single benefit that is received by 10 million children and 320 thousand pregnant women, a family mortgage and a “unique invention” - maternity capital.

As demographer Salavat Abylkalikov from Northumbria University explained in a conversation with The Insider, the main factor in the decline in fertility is the age structure of the population:

“Now the small generation of the 90s has entered reproductive age (20–35 years), when the birth rate has sharply decreased. There were so few of these women that there was no one to give birth and no one to work,” the expert explained.

Abylkalikov noted that in the 90s there was a transition from the late Soviet model of early motherhood to a more modern approach common in developed countries. The age of first birth has shifted from 22–24 years to 25–29 years, and in recent years - over 30. According to the demographer, such a decline in the birth rate was predictable, but requires long-term solutions, since structural changes affect not only demography, but also the market labor. “We see how the demographic crises of past decades leave their mark on the present,” the expert concluded.