Assessing Prospects of Birth Rate in Russia with Governmental Encouragement of Grandparenting

Abstract

The study develops and implements a methodology for assessing the prospects for increasing the birth rate, subject to state incentives for grandparental labor. This is understood as the activity of grandparents, during which the care and development of grandchildren are carried out and which is accompanied by the time costs of the grandparents, which, in turn, reduce the corres­ponding costs of parents for the implementation of parental labor. Grandparental labor has a certain content, it is associated with the expenditure of time and other resources of the progenitors, its activation implies a set of social, economic, demographic effects, one of which may be an increase in the birth rate. We have developed a methodology for assessing such an effect under the condition of state stimulation of grandparental labor. Data collected during surveys of two categories of the population – parents and grandparents with children and grandchildren under the age of 12, respectively, were used as sources of information. The surveys were conducted in the Sverdlovsk Region in the summer of 2021. The main results of the analysis are as follows: a methodology has been developed that allows us to obtain quantitative estimates of the prospects for the growth of the Russian birth rate, subject to state incentives for the parental work of grandparents; partial testing of the developed methodology has allowed us to obtain estimates that allow us to positively assess the prospects for the growth of the Russian birth rate in the first approximation, subject to state incentives for the parental work of grandparents in relation to their grandchildren. The results of the study provide an opportunity to get a more complete picture of the effects of activating and introducing incentives for grandparental labor, create a basis for improving the indicators and measures of the federal project «Older Generation» of the national project «Demography».