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203 Population Aging: Toward a Russia That Is Gray, Sick, and Poor chapter 6 Russia: A Rapidly Graying Society P aradoxicalthoughitmaysoundgivenmodernRussia’shorrendousmortalityrecord, the Russian Federation is a society characterized by pronounced population aging, with much more graying still in prospect. The reason is simple: a population’s age profile is largely determined by fertility patterns (which, so to speak, set the width of the base for society’s population pyramid). With low or sub-replacement fertility levels, the overall composition of society shifts toward the older age groups, even when mortality rates for those same adults are fearfully high. Table 6.1 presents some basic data on Russia’s population aging situation, thereby placing the phenomenon in a global perspective. As of the year 2005, Russia’s median age—the age marker that would bisect the entire population into two equally sized groups—was just over 37 years. By way of comparison, that was nearly a decade higher than the median age for the world as a whole and almost 12 years higher than the median age prevailing in less developed regions. Russia’s median age was slightly lower than the average for the more developed regions as a whole (37.3 years vs. 38.6 years) but well within the range that characterized the affluent graying societies in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. By the benchmark of median age, Russia has been aging fairly rapidly in recent decades. Between 1980 and 2005, median age in the Russian Federation rose by 6 years, or by almost 3 months each and every calendar year. In absolute terms, Russia’s rise in median age over the past generation exceeded the global average (roughly 5 years), falling just below the overall average for the more developed regions (6.0 years vs. 6.6 years). By this criterion, though, Russia’s trajectory of population aging is not appreciably different from that of other Western societies today. 204 nbr Project report u may 2010 Another aperture on the aging phenomenon is afforded by examining the proportion of the total population comprised of people 65 years of age and older. In 2005, just under 14% of Russia’s total population was 65 or older—roughly speaking, every seventh citizen. As recently as 1980, the corresponding fraction would have been every eleventh citizen. In 2005, Russia’s share of men and women 65 years of age and older within its national population was nearly twice as high as the global average. It was, nonetheless, noticeably lower than the average for more developed regions overall (13.8% versus 15.3%). This discrepancy is largely explained by the unfavorable survival patterns for Russians above the country’s median age. Nevertheless, Russian society has already experienced a significant measure of graying. In fact, Russia is now on the verge of becoming an “aged society”—a term commonly applied to populations where 14% or more have reached their 65th birthday.1 Within Russia itself, the degree of population aging today varies dramatically between regions. This may be seen in Figure 6.1, which contrasts the proportion of the population that is 65 or older among Russia’s regions at the dawn of the new century (2001). Although older Russians that year accounted for a national average of 12.7% of the total population, at more local levels the corresponding figures ranged from a low of 3% (in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, across the Bering Strait from Alaska) to a high of over 18% in Tula oblast (which borders the Moscow region). By 2001, at least 25 oblasts among the over 80 regions in Russia for which data was available had passed the notional aged society threshold of 14% of the population 65 years of age or older. These places included Moscow City, St. Petersburg, and much of the European (i.e., Western-most) territory of the country. Yet at the same time, three regions within the Russian Federation (all in the harsh Russian Far East) reported local percentages of older citizens that were below the contemporaneous 1 Students of demography today are generally under the impression that the United Nations has defined an aging society as one where 7% or more of the citizens are 65 or older, with an aged society benchmarked at 14% or more over the age of 65. The documentation for these formal thresholds, as it turns out, is somewhat problematic. Nonetheless, the 7% and 14% notional thresholds for aging societies and aged societies are widely used...

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