For the first time since the 2010 heat wave in Moscow, demographers have estimated the effects of abnormal heat, wildfires and air pollution on morbidity and mortality. Extreme heat in Moscow in the summer of 2010 caused nearly 11,000 additional deaths from diseases of the nervous and cardiovascular systems and respiratory and kidney conditions, according to a group of researchers including Tatyana Kharkova and Ekaterina Kvasha of the HSE Institute of Demography, members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, MosEconomMonitoring, and Swedish researchers.
The proportion of children born outside of marriage is declining in Russia – not because fewer children are being born out of wedlock, but because more children are being born to married couples. In fact, out-of-wedlock children are not necessarily born to single women as used to happen in Soviet times, but instead, most are born to couples living in unregistered unions, according to Sergey Zakharov, Deputy Director of the HSE's Institute of Demography, and Elena Churilova, Postgraduate Student at the Institute's Department of Demography.
Federal and regional maternity benefits such as 'maternal capital', larger child allowances, and other measures introduced since 2007 to improve the country's demography have led to more births, but have not yet contributed to effective fertility rates in Russia. A paper bySergey Zakharov and Thomas Freyka in the HSE's new Demographic Review journal examines Russia's reproductive trends over the past half-century in an attempt to make projections concerning the future effects of the country's demographic policies.
The growth of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), surrogate motherhood, etc, have changed our very idea of parentage. The concept of a parent as an integral and inseparable whole is now being broken down into a number of different roles – there are ‘genetic’ mothers, ‘birth’ mothers and ‘feeding’ mothers while fathers can be ‘genetic’ or ‘social’. This atomisation of parenthood explains the prevailing ambiguous attitude towards ART as Olga Isupova, Alexei Belianin and Anna Gusareva showed in their presentation at the HSE XV April International Conference ‘Economic and Social Development’, in the ‘Demography and Labour Markets’ Section.
During the conference Low Fertility and Low Mortality: Observable Reality and Visions of the Future, dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the HSE Institute of Demography, leading international researchers not only presented their reports, but also shared their impressions about their collaborations with their Russian colleagues.
Dr. Jose Antonio Ortega from the University of Salamanka (Universidad de Salamanca) will be one of the speakers at the XIV HSE April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development. He gave a special interview to the HSE news service.
In October 2012, the Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA) and the Higher School of Economics held an international workshop ‘Labor Market Adjustment in the Commonwealth of Independent States, Central Asia and China in the Wake of the Great Recession’. Vladimir Gimpelson, Director of the HSE Centre for Labour Market Studies, spoke to us about the event and its results.
