Determinants of Abortion Behavior of the Population of Russian Regions

Induced abortion remains among main methods of birth control. This method, called "abortive (abortion) behavior", is one of the reasons for the low birth rate in Russia in the late 20th century and the first quarter of the 20th century. The relevance of this study is due to the need, firstly, to constantly focus public discourse on abortive behavior as a threat to Russia's demographic security and, secondly, to search for reserves for Russia's demographic development in the context of a decrease in the number of women of reproductive age. This article, written by an economist, is devoted to the determinants of the abortion rate in Russia and its regions. To econometrically test the author's assumptions about the determinants from official statistics, a panel of 82 regions for 2000-2022 was formed. Some determinants turned out to be non-stationary. To test the idea of a long-term, equilibrium relationship between the non-stationary abortion rate (the number of abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–49) and non-stationary determinants, a cointegration analysis was used. The result is a cointegrating equation for the abortion rate, which showed that conservatives, if not catalysts, of the abortion rate were the growth in the share of the population with less than a college education and (to a lesser extent) the growth in the incidence of major disease classes, while the inhibitor was the growth in total living space per capita. Among the determinants selected by the author, there are stationary ones. Having transformed the abortion rate into a stationary variable by taking the first difference, the author regressed it on these determinants to identify the short-term relationship between them. Per capita consumer spending had the greatest short-term effect. As it increased, the abortion rate decreased. Per capita cash income, the volume of paid services to the population, the share of the population with cash income below the poverty line and the share of alcohol in consumer spending turned out to be stimulators of abortion behavior in the short term.