The New York Times is reporting that Russia is currently implementing significant incentives to try and stop its declining birthrate. The developed world is slowly learning that nations cannot survive without families.
President Vladimir V. Putin today directed the Russian Parliament to adopt a 10-year program to stop Russia's sharply declining population, principally by offering financial incentives and subsidies to encourage Russian women to have more children.
Mr. Putin's instructions, issued to a compliant Parliament that follows his orders almost without fail, formed the center of his annual address, and signaled a new Kremlin priority to confront a problem that demographers and scholars have warned endangers the long-term future of the Russian state.
Russia's population has been falling since before the collapse of the Soviet Union, trimmed by trends in emigration, rising death rates and declining rates of birth. Mr. Putin has raised the issue in the past, but never with such a clear set of instructions, or at such length in a prominent speech. "The situation is critical in that sphere," he said.
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Mr. Putin then warned that Russia's population has been declining by almost 700,000 people a year, and that the state must stop the decline. In 2004, for every 16 Russians who died, only 10.4 Russian babies were born, according to the most recently available official data.And the average age of death for a Russian man was 58.9 years, far below that of other industrial nations, and roughly two decades behind the average age at death of an American male. Birth rates have also plummeted since Soviet times, falling from an average of 2.63 children per woman in 1958 and 1959 to 1.89 children per woman in 1990 and to 1.34 children per woman in 2004.
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Instead, it is the result of "a constellation of occurrences that include not only infectious disease, but alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, trauma injuries, astounding levels of cardiovascular disease, male/female estrangement and loss of family cohesion, declining physiological fertility, ugly environmental pollution and micronutrient starvation."
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Instead, he took up the cause of fertility. "I propose a program that would promote the birthrate, namely, measures aimed at support for young families, support for women making decisions to give birth and raise their children," he said. "We have to encourage the birth of at least a second child."He called for a wide range of subsidies and financial incentives, some to be paid for by the government and others by employers. These included increasing government subsidies for children up to 18 months of age to about $53 a month for a first child and about $107 for a second child. Mothers currently receive about $25 per month for a child up to 18 months old.
Mr. Putin also proposed maternity leaves as long as 18 months that would pay a mother at least 40 percent of her salary, and compensation for part of the average cost of day care, worth 20 percent of that cost for a first child, 50 percent for a second child and 70 percent for a third.
For mothers of at least two children who opt not to return to work, he proposed an one-time subsidy of about $8,900 upon the birth of a second child — a large sum here. He suggested subsidies for adoptive parents as well, and investments in pre-natal care, maternity hospitals and kindergartens.
(Posted by Trask)
