PRONATALIST POLICY

THE MODEST DEMOGRAPHIC RESULTS OF PRONATALIST POLICY AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF THE LONG-TERM EVOLUTION OF FERTILITY IN RUSSIA

SERGEI ZAKHAROV 

The idea of an extraordinary growth in fertility in Russia is widespread in the Russian expert community and media space. This increase is believed to be indicative of the positive results of the special financial measures taken by the government after 2006 to stimulate fertility. The author’s viewpoint is more reserved. There are some positive developments, but their significance is quite insufficient to view the future of Russian fertility through rose-colored glasses. With this paper, we continue our previous long-term research in the field of in-depth demographic analysis of Russian fertility, incorporating the latest official statistical data for 2014. The paper provides an overview of the trends of key fertility indicators over a few decades, as well as developing some approaches to cohort fertility analysis in order to obtain more reliable projections. In the first part, we examine period fertility indicators (for calendar years), taking into account the latest changes in the structural characteristics of the Russian model of fertility that have occurred over the past several decades. In the second part of the article, we analyse cohort fertility indicators of generations of women whose actual and expected reproductive activity has been occurring in the second half of the twentieth and the first decades of the twenty-first centuries.