CIAO DATE: 05/2010
January 2010
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
In the taxonomy of both the United Nations Population Division (UNPD) and the US Bureau of the Census (USBC), the Russian Federation is listed as a member of the contemporary world's "more developed regions". This categorization looks entirely logical in a number of important respects. Like all other countries in this category, for example, modern Russia's population profile is characterized by relatively low levels of fertility, and by a relatively high ratio of older citizens to total population. But the Russian Federation also exhibits some distinctive features that differentiate it from most of the other "more developed countries" with which it is regularly grouped for purposes of global demographic analysis. For one thing, its income level is markedly lower than in most (although not all) countries of the "more developed regions". (In 2005, according to World Bank estimates, PPP‐adjusted GDP for the Russian Federation was about $11,800, as against the OECD‐wide average of $33,500—in other words, barely one third as high.) Hardly less important, Russia—unlike most other "more developed countries"—is in the grip of an acute demographic crisis. The most important manifestations of this crisis are catastrophically high levels of excess mortality for the adult population (a situation especially acute for the population of conventionally defined working ages) which has resulted in a pronounced and more or less progressive depopulation over the nearly two decades since the end of the Soviet era.
Resource link: The Russian Federation in an Era of Demographic Crisis: The Special Challenges of Population Aging and Social Security Policy [PDF] - 1.1M