Policy Experiment in Russia: Cash-for-Babies and Fertility Change

Population decline in modern day Russia is alarmingly steep: Russia loses approximately 750 thousand people each year. To combat population decline, the Russian government instituted aggressive pro-natalist policies. The paper evaluates the capacity of new policies to change womens reproductive behavior using a socio-institutionalist theoretical framework, which analyzes the gendered interaction between the states, the labor market, and family. The paper arrives to a disappointing conclusion that while efforts to improve fertility are quite aggressive, new policies do not challenge gendered hierarchies neither in public nor in private spheres, which will further depress fertility rates of Russian women.