Seminar "Demographic Indicators in May (2018) Presidential Decree"

The 13th scientific seminar “Modern Demography” was hold on 7 February. At the seminar, Evgeni M. Andreev, Ph.D., head of the International Laboratory for Population and Health (NRU HSE) made a presentation on “Demographic Indicators in the May Decree of the President”.

At the beginning of his speech, E.M. Andreev briefly presented to the audience the target values of life expectancy and other mortality indicators, as well as other demographic indicators under the so-called May presidential decree. In his report, E.M. Andreev set a goal to determine to what extent the goals set in the decree are intertwined. E.M. Andreev spoke about the possible directions of changes in the structure of mortality by causes of death and age groups and pointed to the 'growth reserves' for Russian life expectancy. E.M. Andreev also cited statistics on cases of rapid growth in life expectancy: in the entire history of observations in countries with life expectancies for both sexes exceeding 69 years there were only 17 cases of rapid LE growth (over 3 years for six years). As a rule, these cases are associated with overcoming 'mortality crises'.

The speaker estimated the probability of achieving the target values of such indicators as infant mortality rate, mortality rate from circulatory system diseases, from neoplasms, total fertility rate.

Speaking of healthy life expectancy, E.M. Andreev reminded that this term is used to refer to a range of indicators measuring the duration of that part of the total life expectancy that an average person lives being healthy. E.M. Andreev spoke about the two approaches to the definition of healthy life expectancy, as well as the shortcomings of each of them.

To conclude, E.M. Andreev mentioned that starting from the fourth quarter of 2018, the unified state registry of civil status records has begun to operate in Russia, and not as smooth as it was anticipated. Thus, Russian statistical office was forced to delay the publication of the current demographic data and what has been already published since then is certainly to be revised.