Modification of the Seasonal Pattern of Births in Russia

Background. The pattern of births in Russia has a seasonal component and is considered to undergo drastic changes through history. These changes can be used to judge modification in socio-economic processes in general. Talking about Soviet Russia in the middle 50-s it is known that the amount of child births was decreasing every year till present moment. There were attempts to increase birth rate in USSR and modern Russia. Authorities organized social support programs, they were stimulating citizens to have more children, but, overall, most of them failed. For instance, such programs occurred in the beginning of 1980-s and in the end of 2000-s, and both did not help to raise birth rate in long term. Not only economic crises, wars, migration, or other shocks may be the reason for such an issue, but also transformation from a traditional birth model into the model where parents delay having a child until later in life. That is why, there is scientific interest in exploring this topic more thoroughly. Problem statement. Even though the modification of the fertility model has been studied by many researchers in previous studies, there is very little published investigations about changes in seasonality pattern both on macro- and micro- level, comparing it with the results of other countries. The aim of this study is to define the causes of the births’ pattern modification in Russia and its regions from 1950-s till present. Given the aim of the investigation, the following objectives are addressed in this study: 1. Review the literature research on the reasons of births’ pattern modification in different countries, especially Russia and USSR. 2. Select data on statistical sources, socio-demographic and economic factors across Russian citizens and economic development of the country. 3. Build a model to set the seasonality in fertility and, and then, considering peak birth seasons and months, build a model to determine the influence of sociocultural, demographic and economic factors on changes in the seasonality of fertility. Delimitation of the study. The focus of this paper is the model of fertility in Russia, the object is the modification of the seasonality of pattern of births over a period of 67 years. The information framework will be consisted of demographic data about the number of children born monthly from 1956 till 2002. More updated data will be used to determine the influence of various social and economic factors on the modification of seasonal pattern of births in modern Russia and its regions, in particular, from 2006 till 2023. Professional significance. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to deeper studying and acknowledge the reasons why the seasonal pattern of births in Russia has changed so drastically and, of course, what are the main reasons of such an issue. The fertility model has dynamic indicators which change over time. That is why it is important to renew results constantly. Also, some shocks occurred in Russia over the past few years that may have had an impact on the model of seasonality of births, the amount of child births and the time when they were born. So, there are not so many updated articles that discover this problem. Knowing the information about modification of the seasonal pattern of births in Russia, it is possible to make a forecast for several years in advance about fertility trends which can help to build the right social policy.