Fertility in Transition: Understanding the Fertility Decline in Russia of the 1990s

Between 1989 and 1999 the total fertility rate in Russia declined from 2.01 to 1.16, one of the lowest fertility rates in the world and substantially below the level of population replacement of 2.1 children per woman. Was this decline in fertility caused by the economic collapse that accompanied Russia’s transition from communism in this period? Is the decline only temporary, with women simply delaying births, or does it represent a shift to a permanently lower level of fertility? This paper explores these and related questions using data across Russia’s regions for this period and using individual-level data that record births and abortions. The results indicate that the fertility decline in Russia is related to the large decrease in income experienced by much of the population in this period, as well as to declining marriage rates and (in some specifications) rising unemployment. Measures of macroeconomic instability and uncertainty about the future show surprisingly little correlation with fertility rates and the probability of having a birth, but women with positive expectations about the future were much less likely to have an abortion than were women with negative expectations about the future. __________________ *This research was supported in part by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and by funding provided by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), under authority of a Title VIII grant from the U.S. Department of State. None of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed in this paper. Unless noted otherwise, all demographic data in the paper are from Demograficheskii 1 ezhegodnik Rossii 2005 (The Demographic Yearbook of Russia 2005) (Moscow 2005). See Brainerd and Cutler (2005) for an overview and analysis of the mortality crisis in the former 2 Soviet Union. Stillman (2006) provides a comprehensive survey of the literature on health and mortality in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. 2 In May 2006 Russian president Vladimir Putin announced a radical new package of pronatalist policies designed to halt, and preferably reverse, the steep decline in Russia’s birth rate over the past fifteen years. This package included increased child benefits, longer maternity leaves, and, most strikingly, a payment of over $9,000 to each woman who has a second child. While economists and demographers continue to debate the efficacy of this and similar pronatalist government policies in raising birthrates, the intention of this package of measures was clear: to stop the large declines in population that have affected Russia since the early 1990s. Russia’s population stood at 147 million in 1989 but had fallen to just over 143 million by 2005, a rate of decline remarkable in its size and speed. The population decline is even more 1 dramatic if one excludes the substantial net immigration inflows that Russia experienced over the period: roughly 5.6 million immigrants arrived between 1989 and 2004, suggesting that the number of native Russians fell by close to 10 million people in those years. Declines of this magnitude are alarming, particularly due to the substantial threat such a population change poses to government-funded retirement programs that rely on contributions from current workers to maintain solvency. The drastic measures proposed by President Putin indicate that Russian leaders comprehend the magnitude of the problem created by this population decline. While part of the population decline is due to the massive increase in mortality that occurred in Russia in the 1990s, particularly among middle-aged men, a large part is also due to 2 the equally dramatic declines in fertility that were recorded over the last 15 years. In the decade between 1989 and 1999, the total fertility rate (the average number of children a woman can