Russia's working-age population to shrink by 10 mln by 2025

PanARMENIAN.Net - Russia's working-age population will probably shrink by more than 10 million people by 2025, forcing the country to attract more skilled labor from abroad, AFP quoted a top official as saying on Tuesday, September 13.

Russia's 2010 census showed the country's population had declined by 2.2 million people to 142.9 million since the previous study in 2002.

The drop has largely been blamed on the dire economic conditions that helped topple the Soviet Union and then continued throughout much of the 1990s.

Russia's Security Council chief Nikolai Patrushev said Russia had employed almost its entire reserve of both younger and older workers and may soon need to attract new recruits from abroad.

Official statistics show Russia having 75.4 million working-age people in 2010.

Russian leaders have called the population shrinkage a matter of national security, with President Dmitry Medvedev using a state of the nation address in November to offer special tax allowances to large families.

The government has also mulled ways of attracting high-skilled workers to Russia despite the relatively low wages paid at many of the country's top private firms.

Patrushev said the government needed to come up with new proposals if it wanted to achieve the modernization that Medvedev has been promoting since entering the Kremlin in 2008. "This demands new solutions and measures to attract high-skilled labor, people from the so-called middle class who can achieve modernization," he said.

Russia's State Statistics Committee estimates that the country's population could stand at anywhere between 132.7 and 146.7 million people by 2025.