Fertility in Russia: A Re-Examination Using Microdata

Abstract

This paper employs the microdata of the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE) to discuss the impact of economic factors, such as household income and female wages, and subjective well-being, such as life satisfaction and health condition, on childbirth probability in Russia, which, following a continuous decline in birth rate throughout the 1990s, began to increase in the 2000s, and rose thereafter almost continuously. The following results were obtained: higher household incomes serve to encourage childbirth, while female wages are seen to act by curtailing childbirth, and when indicators such as life satisfaction and health condition are high, the likelihood of childbirth is increased significantly. Most previous research concerning the determinants of the birth rate in Russia has shown that household income has no effect at all, but the findings in this paper suggest that this may have been due to the special circumstances that existed at the beginning of the economic transformation period in the 1990s.