Mortality and life expectancy in Russia for half a century

• Vishnevsky Anatoly G.
• Shchur Alexey E.

Abstract

Russia having approached the indicators of life expectancy of developed countries in the early 1960s again began to be lagging behind them. The longterm adverse mortality trends, exacerbated by the crisis of the 1990s, along with a significant increase in life expectancy at birth in the western and some eastern countries led to a new huge gap in life expectancy between Russia and the leading countries. In the early 2000s this gap reached almost 20 years for males and 13 years for females. Since 2004 the situation began to change, and these gaps have somewhat reduced having returned to the level observed in the early 1990s. (12-15 years for males and 7-10 years for females). Their further reduction will require a serious breakthrough in the fight against mortality of adult population, especially that of middle-aged population, where the situation is now the most unfavorable. It is not very clear how the current level of public expenditure on health care (3.6% of GDP in 2016), one of the lowest in the world among industrialized countries, correlates with solving such an ambitious and resourceintensive task as raising the life expectancy of Russians to 78 years by 2024 and up to 80 years by 2030.

Keywords:life expectancy, epidemiological revolution, infant mortality, age-specific death rates

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