Period and Cohort Fertility Changes under the Pressure of Pronatalist Policy in Putin's Russia: 2006-2025

Sergei Zakharov , University of Strasbourg

Increased concern of the Russian elite about the declining population led to the adoption in 2006 of a pronatalist policy based on monetarist approaches reinforced by conservative-traditionalist ideology. Our analysis is based on indicators from increment-decrement age and birth-order-specific period and cohort fertility tables which are computed on Russian official statistics and harmonized with data from Human Fertility Database (period 1979-2023, female birth cohorts 1944-1995). Extrapolations are used for cohorts born in 1980-1995 to arrive at expected ultimate fertility outcomes. We mostly focus on changes in age profile of maternity, parity progressions and ultimate distributions by number of children born. Our evidence reveals that the transformation of the Russian fertility model continues to be in line with transformations common to developed countries, and to neighboring countries from the former Soviet space. Two decades of active Russian pronatalist policy by increasing financial incentives for childbearing and by imposing a conservative family ideology did not stop the modernization of the fertility pattern within the Second Demographic Transition context. According to our estimates, the marginal effect of the policies is 0.07-0.08 births per woman in terms of the total fertility for cohorts that were in active childbearing in 2006-2021 (i.e., before the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine). Since 2015 period and cohort total fertility rates have been rapidly declining. The impact of the war on Russian fertility is also discussed.

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 Presented in Session P8. Demographic Trends, History, Data and Methods