Russia’s gloomy demographic trends are a fascinating subject.

For years now Russia has been losing some 750,000 people per year. Poor birth rates, high death rates: horrible abortion, HIV, accident and TB statistics, the accumulation of decades of communist mal-investment and then studied unwillingness by successive post-communist administrations to face up to the problem.

There are signs that the rate of decline is decreasing (President Putin has tried to push the issue up the national agenda), but for the time being the population will continue to decline pretty steeply.

Is this good, or bad?

Here is a feisty attempt to say that it is a problem but nothing like as dramatic a problem as some people say:

Even the worst case scenario of only 80 million people on Russia’s territory by 2075 would still leave Russia with a greater population density than contemporary Canada.

Some people (including President Putin) seem to think that Russia needs more children being born. How wrong they are! Thus:

… children make us poorer. In order to maintain any given level of GDP per capita, productivity of the working population has to increase at the same rate as the birth rate just to maintain current levels of GDP per capita.

What sort of people live (and die) in Russia anyway? These:

… the vast majority of the population has been brought up to think along lines of official Marxist-Leninist ideology about a wide range of things … If Russia’s current low life expectancy means that the generations whose ideas about public life are largely informed by Marxism-Leninism is dying off quickly, this means that demand for public policies based on Marxist-Leninist ideas is decreasing. Politically, this can only be a good thing, with definite benefits for the economy.

This is an intriguing point. As I reported to London back in 1996, the longer-term prospects for reform in Russia had to be good: 100,000 likely communist voters were dying every month.

So, the answer? Simple:

If Russians drank as little as the Swiss, ate as well as the Japanese, drove as carefully as the Dutch, and continued to work as hard as, well, Russians, doubling Russia’s GDP per capita in ten years would be a very modest goal.

Quite a big If?