Dramatic health improvement in Moscow: illusion or reality?

Evgueni Andreev, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Pavel Grigoriev, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Domantas Jasilionis, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
France Meslé, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)
Vladimir Shkolnikov, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Jacques Vallin, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

While trends in Russian life expectancy kept being quite unfavorable for the past 20 years, Moscow seems to enjoy rapid progress since the mid-1990s. Is this very strong divergence actual or is there any artefact that can explain it? In other countries of the former USSR mortality in capital city is more or less lower than in the rest of the country but much less than in Russia. Moreover, nowhere any clear divergence appears. Moscow trends are also quite different from those observed for ten other large Russian cities. The paper will discuss the reasons for such a divergence? Does it result from an overestimation of Moscow population at the 2002 census? An attempt to estimate mortality by using former population estimates until 2002 and coherent further projections shows that mortality trends in Moscow are then much closer to that of the ten other large cities. A clearer view on the real impact of the overestimation of population will be given by the comparison of observed differences between cause-specific mortality trends when using “new” or “old” population estimates. If mortality trends keep being more favorable in Moscow after controlling for population overestimation, the role of several factors as differential growth in proportion of educated people or selection effect of recent immigration to Moscow will be considered.