The premiere of the first program devoted to summing up the results of the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence in the economic and social spheres took place on the Experts Club Youtube channel.
In the pilot issue devoted to the demographic situation in our country, the founder of the Experts Club, PhD in Economics Maksim Urakin and the leading researcher at the Ptoukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, PhD in Economics Lidiya Tkachenko, analyzed the main trends in changes in the population of Ukraine over the past 30 years, studied the historical data and UN forecasts for the next century.
The guest of the program noted that Ukraine has one of the worst demographic indicators in the post-Soviet space. According to her, this is primarily due to a sharp decline in the birth rate in the second half of the 1990s, early 2000s.
“Since Soviet times, one of the biggest problems of increasing the birth rate has been mass abortions, which have actually become a tool for regulating the population. At the same time, the birth rate until 1990 remained relatively high – on average 2-3 children per family on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR,” the expert noted.
She also added that today the birth of a child in a Ukrainian family is a “heroic act” due to the difficult socio-economic situation, so a surge in the birth rate cannot be expected in the coming decades.
Tkachenko stressed that since the 1960s, there has been practically no positive dynamics in life expectancy in Ukraine. The average age of both men and women in our country is now about the same as it was 60 years ago, despite a significant global progress in the field of medicine and health care.
“This situation is typical for both the late USSR and the post-Soviet period. At the same time, the countries of both Western and Eastern Europe, even those that were part of the socialist camp, showed much more positive dynamics,” the scientist added.
For more details on the analysis of the demographic situation in Ukraine, see the video posted on the Experts Club channel:
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DEMOGRAPHY, EXPERTS CLUB, LIDIYA TKACHENKO, POPULATION, URAKIN, ВІДЕО
