The excess of deaths over births
Population dynamics is made up of natural increase/decrease (number of births minus number of deaths) and net inflow/outflow of international migrants. Rosstat separately reported on January 28 that the natural population decline in 2021, according to preliminary data, reached 1.04 million people. The previous maximum in modern Russia was set in 2000 – minus 958.5 thousand tons.
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The death rate in 2021 increased by 15.1%, while the birth rate decreased by 2.3% and amounted to 1.4 million people – the lowest since 2002. The birth rate in Russia has been declining since 2014, although the pace of this decline is slowing down.
In June 2021, Rosstat, summing up the final demographic results, reported that the natural decline in 2020 amounted to 702 thousand people.
After World War II, the demography of Russia within the USSR was characterized by stable natural population growth until the late 1980s. This was partly due to the consequences of the war: those who should have died of natural causes in the late Soviet years died “in advance”, said famous Russian demographer Anatoly Vishnevsky.
Increasing migration inflow
The Statistical Service did not publish separate data on the migration component for 2021, but, based on the given figures for the reduction in the number, the migration gain (the number of arrivals minus the number of departures) in January-December amounted to almost 350 thousand people. This means that the migration inflow compensated for the natural loss by about a third.
The results of the census become the foundation for estimating the population, and in the intervals between censuses, the resident population is recalculated based on the data of the registry office system on birth / death and migration registration, the director of the Institute of Demography named after A.G. Vishnevsky National Research University Higher School of Economics Mikhail Denisenko. Rosstat receives data on migration from the territorial bodies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, their reliability is worse than that of data on the vital movement of the population. If there is a deterioration in the quality of migration registration, this upsets the balance of demographic calculations, Denisenko notes. “Yes, the farther from the census, the less accurate estimates. But there is no other way. This is standard world practice,” Irina Kalabikhina, professor, head of the Department of Population at the Faculty of Economics of Moscow State University, told RBC.
Based on preliminary data from Rosstat, net international migration to Russia increased 3.3 times in 2021, to almost 350,000 people (compared to 106,500 in 2020). This happened as a result of an increase in the number of arrivals in Russia, especially from the CIS countries (Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, etc.), and a decrease in the number of those who left the country.
According to Denisenko, the migration increase could increase for two reasons. First, restrictions on international travel were partially lifted, including on the entry of labor migrants into Russia. Secondly, migrants were extended the period of stay in Russia – accordingly, they moved from the category of temporary to the category of permanent ones if their period of stay in Russia exceeded nine months. Otherwise, such migrants would have to be removed from the registration register, and therefore be included in the statistics of those who left (even if they actually remained in Russia). The multiple growth in the balance of incoming and outgoing migrants is hardly a consequence of deep socio-economic reasons, rather it is “adaptation of administrative rules to the pandemic,” Kalabikhina points out.
Impact of the pandemic on population decline
A high level of population decline is associated with “supermortality from covid” – in the form of direct causes or concomitant diseases, Kalabikhina emphasizes. “Covid is not a joke, not a flu, the losses are quite serious,” she says.
In November 2021, the death record among people who were infected with COVID was updated – 87.5 thousand people, of which 80.1 thousand died directly due to coronavirus infection. According to Denisenko, the coronavirus pandemic contributes 60-65% to the natural decline, taking into account the downward trend in mortality that was observed before the pandemic.
Mortality with COVID in Russia in November exceeded the previous record by 16%
Researcher at the University of Tübingen Dmitry Kobak, tracking mortality during the pandemic in different countries, estimated the excess mortality in Russia since the beginning of the pandemic (April 2020 – November 2021) at 989 thousand people – this is the excess of mortality over the pre-Covid five-year trend. And the total number of deaths with coronavirus (the main or concomitant cause, according to the Rosstat classification) for the same period amounted to 625.9 thousand people. Even if an infected person, according to official medical evidence, did not die from COVID, infection with coronavirus could accelerate the course of a chronic disease. In addition, there is a significant category of citizens who recovered from the coronavirus, but after some time died because the transferred COVID with a certain lag affected the circulatory system, endocrine system, etc. This category was first announced by Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova in December 2020. Such people, by definition, do not fall into the statistics of covid mortality, but presumably form part of the “overhang” of excess mortality.
For example, in 2020, the death rate from myocardial infarction in Russia increased by 6% to 39.7 people per 100,000 inhabitants of the country, although it was systematically decreasing every year in 2012-2019. Mortality from acute cerebrovascular accident in 2020 increased by 5% – up to 92.4 people per 100 thousand of the population, follows from Rosstat data.
Excess mortality and increased morbidity have a negative impact on the economy, according to last year’s ACRA study. The VEB.RF Institute for Research and Expertise predicted in November that excess mortality in Russia in 2020-2021 would amount to almost 1 million people, and the annual loss of GDP over this period would average almost 0.1% of GDP. Both ACRA and the VEB Institute stressed that excess mortality (“demographic footprint”) would have a long-term negative impact on the Russian economy.