Forecast of the demographic dividend dy- namics in Russia: influence of the pension reform and the pandemic.

Abstract

Population aging is taking place in Russia: the proportion of older people in the total population is rising, which leads to an increase in the demographic dependency ratio. Sanctions in the long term can have a significant negative impact on the growth rates of the Russian economy, which have shown instability in recent years, and in some periods have taken negative values. These trends determine the relevance of this study. The purpose of the work is to predict the demographic dividend in Russia in the period up to 2036, that is, to predict the impact of population aging on economic growth. When forecasting the future dynamics of the demographic dividend in Russia, we identified two effects: the effect of the 2019 pension reform (a phased change in the retirement age) and the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to our calculations, both the pension reform and COVID-19 have a positive effect on the demographic dividend in Russia (as the boundaries of working age are expanding, and COVID-19 supermortality was more observed among the elderly, which changed the share of the working-age population). At the same time, the effect of the pension reform is much stronger than the effect of the pandemic.