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A blog post will inevitably oversimplify a demographic chart involving millions of people. It's still an interesting chart. The sudden drop in one year, as the
by gruseom 13y ago
A blog post will inevitably oversimplify a demographic chart involving millions of people. It's still an interesting chart.
The sudden drop in one year, as the article points out, was likely because of the economic crisis. As for whether it's ethnic Russians leaving the country, it's not obvious to me why that is the first thing that matters; most discussions on population and economics don't immediately leap to ethnicity, do they?
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoOf course ethnicity matters. If most of the outflow is Russian, then to intentionally ignore that connection is intellectually dishonest.
- gruseom 13y agoOf course there's no question of intentionally ignoring anything. My question is about the economics. Presumably, the economic significance of population decline has to do with its effect on GDP, growth, and the like. It's not obvious (is it?) which of these questions have answers that change depending on the ethnicity of who comes or goes. There's also the question of whether the outflow does in fact consist mostly of Russians. Is there data on this? No one has presented any here, and the various comments in the thread contradict one another.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoIt would be extremely useful to know if the outflow are a lot of say "aging Russians" or "young Estonian/Latvians", as each would have extremely different implications. The fact that the information is missing in the article means we can only speculate. Perhaps the information is obscured or those statistics aren't collected, but without knowing, it is much more difficult to find the cause and ultimately come up with a solution.