Book
Время демографических перемен: избранные статьи
The articles selectedfor publication focus on the theoretical comprehension of fundamental demographic changesoccurring in the world, on their determinants and consequences. These consequences are universaland run through all levels of social reality, from the family to the global.Great attention is paid to Russian population issues. The author seeks to understand andto explain Russia’s demographic problems in the context of universal and global demographicchanges and challenges. Some articles are devoted to the history and current state of Russianpopulation studies.
The potential audience of the book are researchers representing a broad range of socialscience disciplines, teachers and students, politicians and journalists, and a wide range of readersinterested in population studies and related sciences.
The publication is timed to coincide with the 80th birthday of Anatoly Vishnevsky.
Today most countries are experiencing fast population aging, which is going to last the entire 21st century. Its economic effects are multifarious and will in large part shape further dynamics of the global economy not only in the short or medium but also in the long run. Unfortunately, Russian economists and politicians are hardly aware of how diverse economic consequences of population aging are since their attention is focused on its narrow, purely pragmatic, dimensions (such as the raising of pension age, the deficit of the Russian Pension Fund etc.). The paper provides a broad overview of major economic effects of population aging from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. It examines the place of aging in the process of demographic transition, and forecasts its expected trends in subsequent decades for a few countries including Russia. Next, it critically reviews different versions of dependency/support ratios: demographic and economic; chronological and prospective; non-adjusted and adjusted for differences by age in labor income and per capita consumption. Special attention is paid to a basic scheme of relationships between key demographic and macroeconomic variables that highlights how population aging might affect employment, labor productivity, capital intensity, wages, returns to capital, investment and savings. Some additional effects are also analyzed, such as prospective changes in labor supply, human capital accumulation, technological change, real interest, and inflation. A general conclusion is that population aging is not per se a fundamental economic challenge that should endanger society’s welfare. Real dangers arise from existing institutions providing support for the elderly, which were established in the early to mid 20th century under completely different demographic and economic conditions.
The paper examines the role of migration in Russia in achieving the government's strategic goals of population growth and ensuring natural growth by 2024. For the migration forecasting, cohort-component method and the algorithms of replacement migration are used. As a result, annual migration growth of 300-304 thousand people is required to maintain the current population size within next five years. Annual migration growth of 6.0-8.9 million people is needed to ensure natural growth. The last means that the goal will not be fulfilled.
In the middle of last century, life expectancy at birth in Russia was similar to that of other European countries. However, from 1964, it slowly declined, with male life expectancy falling by 7·5 years to the nadir of 57·4 years in 1994 after the collapse of the Soviet Union (with an equivalent decrease of 2·3 years in women to 71·1 years). After a slow restoration to the year 2005, life expectancy is increasing at an unprecedented pace of 0·82 years per year, reaching 67·5 years for men and 77·6 years for women in 2017. Pessimists might say that this is just a rebound effect, restoring previous loss rather than indicating continued growth. This question was addressed in a study
in 2014, where the authors cautiously concluded that the increase in Russian life expectancy is a result of the national project to address health care and other state measures. Some of the same authors are now asking whether the current life expectancy in Russia is consistent with the country's wealth.
Several approaches to the concept of fatherhood present in Western sociological tradition are analyzed and compared: biological determinism, social constructivism and biosocial theory. The problematics of fatherhood and men’s parental practices is marginalized in modern Russian social research devoted to family and this fact makes the traditional inequality in family relations, when the father’s role is considered secondary compared to that of mother, even stronger. However, in Western critical men’s studies several stages can be outlined: the development of “sex roles” paradigm (biological determinism), the emergence of the hegemonic masculinity concept, inter-disciplinary stage (biosocial theory). According to the approach of biological determinism, the role of a father is that of the patriarch, he continues the family line and serves as a model for his ascendants. Social constructivism looks into man’s functions in the family from the point of view of masculine pressure and establishing hegemony over a woman and children. Biosocial theory aims to unite the biological determinacy of fatherhood with social, cultural and personal context. It is shown that these approaches are directly connected with the level of the society development, marriage and family perceptions, the level of egality of gender order.
This article is talking about state management and cultural policy, their nature and content in term of the new tendency - development of postindustrial society. It mentioned here, that at the moment cultural policy is the base of regional political activity and that regions can get strong competitive advantage if they are able to implement cultural policy successfully. All these trends can produce elements of new economic development.