AEI - Russia's Demographic / Economic Disaster

AEI - Russia's Demographic Disaster

clipped from article:

Figure 13: From one perspective, we might describe Russia today as "disinvesting in people." The shrinking of Russia's population through brutally high mortality and steep subreplacement fertility will make for inescapable repercussions for Russia's political economy that will become evident in the next ten to twenty years. Figure 13 shows the estimated and projected population of adults age fifteen to sixty-four from 2005 to 2030. During this time, Russia is slated to see its working-age population drop by perhaps one-fifth, or about 20 million, with the sharpest decrease occurring amongst the youngest Russians--fifteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds (the group that would ordinarily be expected to exhibit the highest levels of educational attainment and to possess the latest training).

Russia, in short, appears to be on a path toward a broader human resources crisis. To make matters worse, a polity that relies excessively on extractive resources such as oil and gas, at the expense of investments in its people, can quickly become hostage to fluctuations in commodity prices. Thus, the "resource curse" reinforces the human resources crisis. Russia, alas, risks getting trapped into just such a downward spiral.

RO Spring 2009 Special Figure 13

Figure 14: According to the projections of the United Nations, the U.S. Census Bureau, and Goskomstat, Russia will not only have a much smaller population by 2030; it will also have an older population. In all these projections, the only age groups that are expected to increase in population between 2005 and 2030 are the cohorts sixty years of age and older. The future Russia is set to be smaller than today, but also decidedly "grayer." The median age of Russia's working-age population, for example, is projected to rise by about four years to around forty-two--not a reassuring thought, considering the current health status of Russian forty-somethings. Senior citizens--the sixty-five-plus population--are projected to account for one-fifth or more of Russia's population by 2030, nearly half again as large a fraction as today. Russia's senior citizens will almost certainly be much more infirm and less fit for gainful employment than their counterparts in the West. The unanswered question, then, is, "Who will support Russia's seniors a generation hence?"

RO Spring 2009 Special Figure 14

Click here to view this Outlook as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.

Nicholas Eberstadt (eberstadt@aei.org) is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI. Apoorva Shah (apoorva.shah@aei.org) is a research assistant at AEI.