Policy Review June & July 1999, No. 95 Published by The Heritage Foundation, Washington DC http://www.policyreview.com/jun99/eberstadt.html
Russia: Too Sick to Matter? By NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
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Although the USSR's departure from the world stage was remarkably peaceful, the collapse of the Soviet system nevertheless brought on a veritable explosion of mortality in Russia. Between 1989-91 (the last years of Soviet rule) and 1994, crude death rates in Russia shot up by 40 percent.
Though the mortality situation has improved somewhat since then, crude death rates in Russia in the first half of 1998 were still nearly 30 percent higher than they had been in the USSR’s final years. This mortality shock (in tandem with a concomitant sudden drop in fertility levels) has pushed Russia into a continuing population decline for the first time since World War II. At the moment, Russia's deaths are exceeding its births by well over half - about 700,000 a year.
Although the fact has gone largely unrecognized, the loss of life from this quiet crisis in Russia has been a catastrophe of historic proportions. The dimensions of the catastrophe are suggested by estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO has prepared "age standardized" death rates for Russia and many other countries. (These "standardized" rates differ from the crude rates in that they control for population aging and other such phenomena.) Against the benchmark of 1987 - a relatively good year for personal survival in the old Soviet era - "excess mortality" in Russia during the four years 1992-95 would have amounted to nearly 1.8 million deaths. To put that figure in perspective: For the four years of World War I, the military death count for the Russian Empire is generally placed at 1.7 million. And WHO has not yet published "age standardized" death rates for Russia for the years 1996-98; when it does, we are likely to find that Russia’s "excess mortality" in the 1992-98 period alone exceeded 3 million deaths.
[IDEOLOGY IRRUPTION. Note that it's U.S. economic "overperformance" and Chinese "underperformance" at work - not the social barbarities of U.S. capitalism or the positive social achievements of Chinese quasi-socialism!]
Nevertheless, the fact remains that, at any given time, a country's level of life expectancy turns out to be quite a good predictor of its level of income. There are, of course, certain countries for which such predictions consistently veer off the mark, but even in those cases, the deviations are readily explicable.
The United States, for example, "overperforms" economically - its income level is always higher than would be predicted solely on the basis of its health attainment. That differential may be understood in terms of the added productivity made possible by our technological pre-eminence, our corporate/managerial advantages, and our cadre of highly trained specialists. Conversely, China is an "underperformer" economically - there, per capita output is always lower than the country's life expectancy per se would predict. But given China's technological backwardness and the still problematic nature of its "institutional infrastructure" (markets, laws, and the like), it is hardly surprising that human resources should be less productive in China than they might be elsewhere.