Russia Demographic Data for 2016 Released

Comments

1. anony-mouse says

   March 17, 2017 at 7:42 pm

   ‘…The fertility rate in Crimea and Sevastopol has also increased since 2014, which you presumably wouldn’t expect of regions under brutal occupation…’

   An Unz.com writer essentially saying that the situation of the Palestinians on the West Bank is good. Improvement!
2. Felix Keverich says

   March 17, 2017 at 7:43 pm

   Fertility declines in the Muslim republics of Caucasus bring a smile to my face 🙂

   Republic of Ingushetia 2.231 2.278 1.971 1.752
   Chechen Republic 2.925 2.912 2.799 2.622

   Finally, all this money Moscow spent to bring civilisation to Chechnya appear to pay off!
3. Glossy says

   March 17, 2017 at 9:52 pm

   Ingushetiya has the highest life expectancy in Russia, and all the Caucasus republics are higher than the federal average. I’m guessing this is because old people have a role in large, extended traditional families. They don’t feel lonely and useless, so they live longer. Same with East Asians, both at home and in the West.
4. Felix Keverich says

   March 17, 2017 at 10:04 pm

   It’s a lot simpler actually: devout Muslims don’t binge drink.
5. Anatoly Karlin says

   March 17, 2017 at 10:19 pm

   It’s simpler: No vodka bingeing (edit: As Felix also pointed out).

   PS. Also perhaps a bit of statistical fidgeting, though don’t quote me on this. Something I’m investigating atm.

   Re-East Asians, I strongly suspect they just naturally live slightly longer than North Europeans, same as Mediterraneans. A great deal is also made of Mormon life expectancy, but Utah whites don’t live any longer than, say, Coloradans; or their New England cousins. The whites who do live noticeably longer than any other whites in the US are those in Washington D.C., who so far as I’m aware don’t excel in family values (they do excel in average IQ, however).
6. Glossy says

   March 17, 2017 at 11:24 pm

   Northern European family values are all about maintaining the nuclear family, specifically men being monogamous and not abandoning their children. This sort of family values does not include adults living with their parents or being deferential to them, so old people’s life expectancy does not benefit from it. East Asian and Mediterranean/Middle Eastern family values are a completely different thing, which does benefit oldsters.
7. Dan Hayes says

   March 18, 2017 at 12:32 am

   Anatoly,

   Seventh Day Adventist Loma Linda California is designated by National Geographic as one of the five longest-living communities in the world.

   On a personal note, one time in a Roman Catholic nun’s cemetary I was amazed by the nun’s longevity. I’ve never pursued this matter any further.
8. 5371 says

   March 18, 2017 at 1:16 am

   For life expectancy at birth in Ingushetiya to be 81 years just doesn’t pass the smell test. There are likely to have been other statistical shenanigans which are not so immediately obvious, and that applies to fertility rates as well.
9. g2k says

   March 18, 2017 at 4:39 am

   It’s interesting to also see the northern/southern gap. Not sure whether there’s more “Mediterranean” drinking habits in the south or whether the cold, short winter day length and, presumably, rarer fresh food finish people off a couple of years earlier in the North.
10. The Big Red Scary says

    March 18, 2017 at 5:59 am

    For what it’s worth, everyone in Loma Linda works either at the hospital, the medical school, or at a vegetarian restaurant.
11. Jon0815 says

    March 18, 2017 at 7:02 am

    Fertility in the seven majority-Muslim regions continues to decline rather quickly: If my math is correct, the average in those regions (weighted for population) was 2.04 in 2014, 1.99 in 2015, and 1.93 in 2016.
12. Felix Keverich says

    March 18, 2017 at 8:05 am

    This is a big deal imo, and I hope Anatoly will spend some time to adress this trend.

    Some Russian nationalists have a slogan: “Stop feeding the Caucasus”. Yet the federal money is used to build infrastructure and urban housing, enabling the locals to lead more civilised lives. This also means lower fertility.
13. Glossy says

    March 18, 2017 at 10:49 am

    I don’t know if infrastructure and urban housing would lower their fertility. Greater Internet penetration could do it. More higher education among women. Greater involvement of women in the job market.
14. Felix Keverich says

    March 18, 2017 at 11:33 am

    Greater level of urbanisation correlates with lower fertility pretty much everywhere on Earth. Granted, no one really understands how human reproductive behavior is shaped, but before we can even talk about things like “higher education” and a “job market”, first we must get these people out of isolated mountain villages and place them into urban setting.
15. Hector_St_Clare says

    March 18, 2017 at 11:41 am

    Glad to see that the Muslim fertility rate (especially in Chechnya) is declining quite markedly. Anatoly, do you have a longer time series so I could look at historical Chechen TFR?
16. neutral says

    March 18, 2017 at 12:42 pm

    That Jewish Autonomous Oblast is just another good example of the double standards when it comes to jews. Nobody would have ever given the Germans their own oblast, even though there was once a big German population in Russia, yet Stalin only gave the jews their own autonomous region but he is still called an anti semite.
17. Hector_St_Clare says

    March 18, 2017 at 1:19 pm

    Neutral,

    Yes, there was a German autonomous region for certain periods of history:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_German_Autonomous_Soviet_Socialist_Republic

    Clearly the two situations are different since 1) Germans had gone to war with Russia several times in history (starting with the Teutonic Knights and ending with the Nazi invasion that ended up killing over 20 million Soviets), and 2) Germans already had a large country of their own, whereas the Jews didn’t at the time when Birobidzhan was created. In spite of that though, Volga Germans did have their own region for awhile.

    I was just reading the other day about the abortive plans (never put into effect) to create a homeland for Gypsies / Roma somewhere on Soviet territory, analogous to Birobidzhan for the Jews. It’s a pity that never happened. Roma have not assimilated well in Eastern / Central Europe (to state the obvious), and giving them their own country or at least autonomous region would probably have been the best thing for all concerned. (At this point in history, encouraging Roma migration to the United States might be the best solution to the ethnic conflict in places like Hungary, the Czech Republic, etc.).
18. Hector_St_Clare says

    March 18, 2017 at 1:23 pm

    Glossy,

    There’s some evidence that at very high levels of human development, you start getting a positive relationship between prosperity and fertility again. The nadir of fertility appears to be when you reach the prosperity level of southern Europe and eastern Asia.

    Caveat: I’m not sure I believe this paper. The curve that they identify looks to be heavily influenced by a single rich high-fertility outlier (Israel). I haven’t run the numbers though so it still might be true.

    http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7256/abs/nature08230.html
19. alaskaguy says

    March 18, 2017 at 2:13 pm

    If you analyzed the siberians separately from russians in eastern districts, would TFR go dramatically up, like in Tuva? Are reindeer herders really being outbred by Chechens or is the non-alcohol/relative lack of gibs subsiziding these caucasians?
20. Sean says

    March 18, 2017 at 3:29 pm

    The difference is Israel has already given some autonomy to the West Bank Palestinians, and the avowed policy of the Israeli government (and the US) is for Israel to negotiate on further concessions. All the Palestinians have to do is sit tight and wait.
21. Hector_St_Clare says

    March 18, 2017 at 3:48 pm

    Jewish fertility in the West Bank is actually higher than Arab fertility, believe it or not. Jewish women in the WB (who I assume are largely hyper-patriarchal Ultra-Orthodox settlers) have a TFR equivalent to Afghanistan, last I checked.
22. 5371 says

    March 18, 2017 at 4:07 pm

    No gypsies would move there, any more than jews moved to Birobidzhan.
23. Hector_St_Clare says

    March 18, 2017 at 4:20 pm

    5371:

    I don’t know. Unlike Jews, Roma/Gypsies in eastern Europe (both then and now) are really, really poor / miserable. It’s not a comparable situation.

    (Yes, there were a lot of poor / miserable Jews back in Stalin’s day, but the condition of Roma in Eastern Europe is really a whole different level of terrible).
24. enkidusvk says

    March 18, 2017 at 4:52 pm

    You are right. In the North Caucasus republics, the actual population is lower than what are the official figures, because the emigration (to other Russian regions and to abroad) from them is underreported, from what I read on a website of one Russian blogger, he estimates the real population of Ingushetiya to be only 79% of the official number, with Chechnya he estimates it to be 90%. This means that the official number underestimate the fertility rate and overestimate the life expectancy. But it is ofc not confined to these republics, there are more regions in Russia where this is the case.
25. enkidusvk says

    March 18, 2017 at 4:56 pm

    The TFR decreases there substantially, they are clearly undergoing demographic revolution, but the official numbers are little bit underestimating the real TFR as in the North Caucasus republics the actual population is lower than what are the official figures, because the emigration (to other Russian regions and to abroad) from them is underreported, from what I read on a website of one Russian blogger, he estimates the real population of Ingushetiya to be 79% of the official number, with Chechnya he estimates it to be 90%. This means that the official number underestimate the fertility rate and overestimate the life expectancy. But it is ofc not confined to these republics, there are more regions in Russia where this is the case.

    So your smile is justified, but the situation is little bit less rosy.
26. Anatoly Karlin says

    March 18, 2017 at 5:15 pm

    Would you happen to have a link?

    I am familiar with this article, though the argument he makes is that TFR is also artificially inflated: https://sputnikipogrom.com/politics/52925/dead-souls/
27. Anatoly Karlin says

    March 18, 2017 at 5:19 pm

    Most Siberian regions are majority ethnic Russians. Outside Tuva, and to a lesser extent Altai Republic, they are are overwhelmingly Russian. For instance, Irkutsk oblast is 94% Russian.

    Ethnic Russians in Siberia just have higher TFR’s than in the center.

    JayMan has some theories why that is so: https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/further-testing-the-pioneer-hypothesis-canada-and-russia/
28. enkidusvk says

    March 18, 2017 at 5:56 pm

    Sure, Anatoly. The blogger is zemfort1983 (he is not professional demographer, but a lawyer – at least I think) and he is for me the source of newest info on Russian demography as I am not Russian, but speak Russian moderately.

    Here in the discussion on his blog below a post (just expand his comment and you will find it) he mentions the numbers I just quoted http://zemfort1983.livejournal.com/938744.html

    and here is his reasoning and way how he does his calculations of the real population of North Caucasus republics (posts from 2014): http://zemfort1983.livejournal.com/237353.html
    and http://zemfort1983.livejournal.com/237767.html
29. Felix Keverich says

    March 18, 2017 at 6:08 pm

    I’m not sure it works like this. Tell me, does the number of births in Russia reported by Rosstat includes the non-citizens? When a non-citizen woman gives birth in Moscow is it included in Russian statistics somehow?

    Moscow’s TFR looks surprisingly low given that it’s actual population is probably 50% bigger than the one officially reported. I suspect that ‘propiska’ may be required by authorities to accept that you really exist. In other words TFR for Moscow could only be calculated based on Moscovites with propiska in Moscow. And if the parents have propiska in Dagestan, their baby is counted as though he was born in Dagestan. This is so absurd and stupid, that it sounds like something the Russian statistics service would do 🙂

    Anyway, we should probably take these numbers with a grain of salt, they are mostly useful insofar as they help us identify a trend.
30. enkidusvk says

    March 18, 2017 at 6:24 pm

    When it comes to your questions, I really do not know. I am sorry.

    What I was trying to say and what I read on other forums about Russian demography, that there is a mess in the regional statistics and people migrating between Russian regions and thus the intraregional calculation of TFR means that some regions TFR are overestimated and some are underestimated. And the blogger zemfort1983 seems to be competent about this and that is why I quoted his numbers.

    But as you say, trends and numbers for federal districts hold. And they say that non-Russian TFR decreased last year, while Russian stayed the same. While in previous years Russian TFR was increasing, while non-Russian stagnating/increasing very slowly (due to Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, while the NC republics were decreasing at that time, too).

    Btw, he estimates real TFR of the NC republics for year 2016 to be:
    Dagestan – 2,36;
    Ingushetiya – 2,22;
    Kab-Bal – 1,97;
    Kar-Cher – 1,65;
    Chechnya – 2,92.
31. inertial says

    March 18, 2017 at 6:35 pm

    In the Soviet Union mountain dwellers from North Caucasus had a reputation for long life expectancy. As an illustration, here is a relevant Soviet era joke.

    An old man descends down a mountain into the city and goes into a men’s clothing store.
    “Can I buy a suit for a wedding?”
    “Grandpa, you are almost a hundred years old, why do you need a suit for a wedding?”
    “It’s not for me, it’s for my dad.”
    “Your dad must be 120 years old, why would he want to get married?”
    “He doesn’t want to, his parents are making him.”
32. Anatoly Karlin says

    March 18, 2017 at 6:49 pm

    Thanks!

    I’ll look into this.
33. Felix Keverich says

    March 18, 2017 at 7:06 pm

    Btw, he estimates real TFR of the NC republics for year 2016 to be:
    Dagestan – 2,36;
    Ingushetiya – 2,22;
    Kab-Bal – 1,97;
    Kar-Cher – 1,65;
    Chechnya – 2,92.

    I think I see how these estimates were calculated. You said he thinks population of Ingushetiya is only 79% of the official number…
    So his estimated TFR = (official TFR)/0,79 = 1.752/0,79=2,2177

    However, TFR is calculated relative to the population of women of childbearing age, as opposed to CRUDE BIRTHRATE, which is calculated by dividing the number of births by the total population. “Adjusting” official TFR the way zemfort1983 does it makes for a very crude approximation, so crude, it calls the utility of his approach into question.

    In other words, we’re better off using Rosstat’s numbers.
34. Anatoly Karlin says

    March 18, 2017 at 7:28 pm

    I agree – if that’s his method, it’s very crude indeed.

    OTOH, since most internal migrants are middle-aged, this method would if anything underestimate the needed upwards adjustment to TFR?
35. Felix Keverich says

    March 18, 2017 at 7:45 pm

    I’d also say that Caucasian women are less likely than men to move in search of work. There are so many variables here – independent analyst will never be able to account for all. There is simply not enough publicly available data to work with.
36. alaskaguy says

    March 18, 2017 at 8:07 pm

    Thanks for responding. I guess that even if people like mansi, khanty, nenets, ket had massive birthrates or at least comparable to tuvans, it would still be insignificant datawise. I was actually curious about the “siberians” TFR in contrast to Russians, Ukrainians, and Tatars in that question.
37. Boris N says

    March 18, 2017 at 8:34 pm

    Chechens and Tuvans are breeding like hell. Even with the decline it is impressive.

    But I see nothing particularly exciting in my oblast and its neighbors. Hardly anything has changed.
38. Boris N says

    March 18, 2017 at 8:51 pm

    The impossibility for the Roma to settle or have a homeland is cultural. They have a deep ingrained nomadic mentality. This is the way they started as a nation. If a Roma settles and starts to live like all other nations around this Roma stops being a Roma. And the Roma language is undeveloped, it is practically a street jargon, and they have no particular distinct religion or culture, so having nothing distinct other than their nomadic mentality and semi-criminal way of life the Roma assimilate in one generation if they abandon it.
39. 5371 says

    March 18, 2017 at 11:59 pm

    I know, but as you must also know, all those claims were in due course debunked and abandoned, which didn’t spoil the joke.
40. melanf says

    March 19, 2017 at 2:33 am

    “Nobody would have ever given the Germans their own oblast”

    Currently in Russia there are Azovsky German National District ( Deutscher Nationalkreis Asowo) near Omsk and German Ethnic District (Deutscher Nationalrajon) in Altai
41. enkidusvk says

    March 19, 2017 at 1:49 pm

    It might be crude, but it will be much closer to reality than the official number of 1.752 for Ingushetiya, that is even lower than the Russian average.
42. truthman says

    March 19, 2017 at 3:54 pm

    So do we have an overall idea of what the likely tfr for Slavs vs non-Slavs in Russia is?
43. Anatoly Karlin says

    March 19, 2017 at 4:03 pm

    Yes, its about 0.1 children per woman lower (so 1.65-1.70).
44. truthman says

    March 19, 2017 at 4:36 pm

    Are there any lessons from the Kirov or Kostroma oblasts on why they have a higher tfr. Looks like Kirov has one of the star areas anywhere in the white world, going from 1.59 to 1.94 over the last 7 years. This would almost justify a fact finding road trip of concerned pro-Western leaders and thinkers.
45. Anatoly Karlin says

    March 19, 2017 at 6:14 pm

    They tend to be high fertility like the Buryats and Tuvans, around 3.0-3.5 children per woman.

    However, there are few of them.
46. truthman says

    March 20, 2017 at 11:20 am

    Anatoly, have you been following demographic trends in Poland? Since last spring families are given 500 zloty’s a month per second and higher children in the family. The Polish government is claiming that its having an effect, with higher than average births for the last five months or so. Might be worth checking out.
47. karl1haushofer says

    March 20, 2017 at 11:49 am

    What about emigration and immigration statistics?

    I’m especially interested in how many Russians moved out of Russia (excluding the guest workers from CIS-countries who returned to their home countries).
48. Anatoly Karlin says

    March 20, 2017 at 1:25 pm

    Demoscope has a huge issue on that:

    http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2017/0719/barom01.php

    Graphs: http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2017/0719/img/b_graf01.jpg
    (purple = arrivals; dark purple = departees)

    By country: http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2017/0719/img/b_graf03.jpg
    Officially, very few Russians leave for the Far Abroad, it’s better to look at foreign arrivals statistics for that.

    But the figures there are still low, and I don’t expect any major changes to have occured in 2016.

    My article on this: http://www.unz.com/akarlin/nth-wave-of-russian-emigration/