Armenia’s Ambitious Population Plan
They Won’t Make It.
I was forwarded an article by Matthew Martin yesterday:
The linked article is this:
Can Armenia reverse it’s population decline? Well, first of all, let’s investigate that decline more closely. Here are population estimates for Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the Russian Caucusus since 1830. I should note that you should take these with a heaping spoonful of salt in all years, for reasons I’ll get to below, but they’re the best figures I’ve got right now.
As you can see, Azerbaijan and the Russian Caucusus regions have been growing since the fall of communism, while Georgia and Armenia have been shrinking. By declaring a goal of 4 million people by 2040, Armenia’s leaders are calling for a growth rate of about 1.2% per year, which was what growth was right before the end of communist rule. That is, it’s what growth was before the advent of free-er movement and migration. It’s what growth currently is in Azerbaijan and the Russian Caucusus.
Is this plausible? Well… here’s what that graph looks like if I add in the range of UN population forecasts.
As you can see, Armenia’s goal is way outside of any plausible statistical range. It would entail Armenia reaching record-breaking population levels and actually exceeding their more populous neighbor, Georgia, by a significant amount.
This isn’t likely without some fairly remarkable conditions. But let’s read further and see what Armenia’s plan is:
So far, the government has said little about how it intends to increase the population. In his speech, Sargsyan said the initiative would have three prongs: halting emigration, increasing the birthrate and longevity, and creating economic conditions that would encourage emigrants to return to Armenia. By the end of 2017, the government will come up with a long-term strategy, as well as a five-year medium-term plan with “concrete measures and their implementation timetable,” a senior Sargsyan adviser, Aram Gharibyan, told EurasiaNet.org.
Hm. Okay. So… there’s no plan yet, except to fix everything all at once.
Armenia has made some modest efforts to encourage families to bear more children. One program, launched in 2012, offers 1 million drams (about $2,100) to families who have a third or fourth child and 1.5 million (about $3,130) for fifth children on up. But those one-off benefits do not seem to be enough to influence most Armenians’ family planning decisions, Markosian said. “Maybe that pays for diapers for a year and not much more,” he said. “You need to pay at least 3–4 million drams for parents to think it’s worth it.”
Well, hold up, that’s pretty generous actually. Average household income in Armenia is probably between $3,000 and $7,000 or so. That means that these incentives amount to a pretty large share of annual income. It’s hard for me as an economist to understand the view that this money only pays for diapers when this is equivalent to something like half the annual income of an Armenian household.
I should note: pro-natalist policy has a bad track record of effectiveness. Virtually no government anywhere has actually found a way to persistently increase fertility. My view is that financial incentives probably do slightly boost fertility, but it is very slight; Armenia’s case shows that to actually get people to have more kids, rather than just have them sooner, you probably need to offer benefits equal to an entire year’s income or more. That is, only financial incentives that make it worth a woman’s time to leave work and be a parent full-time will succeed in seriously shifting fertility trends.
Is Emigration Bad?
The whole article has this tone that emigration is a huge problem, and characterizes the view that emigration is a natural part of globalization as “denialist.” That’s disappointing. The base case UN projections already project that Armenia will have less net outmigration than Azerbaijan or Georgia. As of the 2015–2020, the UN’s most recent forecasts actually identified Armenia as expected to have slightly positive migration, though it declines again by the 2020–2025 window.
Let’s look at some of the things that would need to happen to get the growth that Armenia’s leaders want. Let’s start with the assumption that they want to have positive natural increase no matter what. Well, here’s the share of the population represented by women ages 15–34 according to the UN, forecast out to 2100:
Ruh-roh. You’re looking at simply having a much smaller share of the population that could have babies. Just to maintain the same crude birth rate in the 2030s, Armenia will need to get each reproductive-age woman to have about 40% more children. That means the average woman will need to go from having something like 1.5 children to having more like 2.1 kids. In other words, simply to maintain its current birthrate, not even its population growth rate, just its birth rate, Armenia must achieve above-replacement fertility. That’s a bad indicator.
And even if Armenia achieves the maintenance of its current birthrate, which as I’ve explained would be a herculean task, population aging will still result in natural population decline sometime in the 2040s. Under current UN projections, natural population decline should set in sometime in the 2020s.
Maybe these are too dire. But it’s worth noting, the UN does forecast rising fertility per woman in Armenia. They’re not making the most pessimistic assumptions they plausibly could.
On migration, the reality is that Armenia is already lowering outflows. Since 2009 when this data stops, outflows have fallen even further. Where Armenia is really struggling, like Azerbaijan, is on inflows. Both countries have very low rates of inflow: under 0.05% of population. U.S. inflows are orders of magnitude greater than that, as are many developed (and many developing) countries. A country can sustain high outflows if it also has high inflows.
One reason outflows are slowing is because Armenia has fewer and fewer of the young people who are most likely to migrate. But if you lower emigration simply by having your population age out of high-migration-risk age brackets, you haven’t accomplished anything. The goal should not be to focus on outflows, but to focus on inflows. The question of how Armenia can prevent exit is far less important than the question of how it can encourage entry. But promoting immigration is always a political hot potato.
But to be clear: even with balanced migration, the UN forecasts Armenian population decline to around 2 million people. Even if outflows are near-zero like inflows are, decline will commence.
Only immigration can yield the growth rates Armenia wants to achieve.
Conclusion
Armenia’s population goals are unobtainable. By setting the goal so high, they guarantee a failure to deliver. Picking a more realistic goal (say, maintaining population in excess of 3 million people) would be both more feasible, and more likely to deliver politicians in Armenia a political victory when it is accomplished. Saying, “We will work to ensure we at least meet the UN’s high-path projection” is a decent and responsible goal.
The subtext here, however, is about international politics. Armenia and Azerbaijan have a cold war of their own that’s getting hotter by the day. Having a larger population means more people to draft in a conflict, a bigger economy, and many other advantages in war. Here’s the ratio of Azerbaijan’s to Armenia’s populations from 1990 to 2016, then the UN forecast out to 2040.
The Armenian government’s goal is a kind of implicit attempt to reverse their worsening population imbalance versus Azerbaijan., in essence to keep the ratio near its 2000s level, rather than continual worsening as the UN predicts.
Population policy is often subordinated to national security. The most famous case may be French pro-natalism after WWI, but it’s not hard to find examples. The problem is that these efforts usually fail.
We’ll see if Armenia can break the mold.
Check out my Podcast about the history of American migration.
If you like this post and want to see more research like it, I’d love for you to share it on Twitter or Facebook. Or, just as valuable for me, you can click the recommend button at the bottom of the page. Thanks!
Follow me on Twitter to keep up with what I’m writing and reading. Follow my Medium Collection at In a State of Migration if you want updates when I write new posts. And if you’re writing about migration too, feel free to submit a post to the collection!
I’m a native of Wilmore, Kentucky, a graduate of Transylvania University, and also the George Washington University’s Elliott School. My real job is as an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, where I analyze and forecast cotton market conditions. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research.
