The Effectiveness of Russia's Demographic Policy: Experience of Assessment Using a Combined Approach

The national project “Demography” was completed in 2024; in 2025, new demographic national projects were launched – “Family” and “Long and Active Life”. For their successful implementation, it is important to assess the effectiveness of demographic policy in Russia, which was the aim of the study. The paper analyzes the existing approaches to assessing the effectiveness of demographic policy, identifies their strengths and limitations. We show that there is still no unified position among experts regarding the definition of the effectiveness of demographic policy and the method of its analysis. The study assesses the effectiveness of Russian demographic policy using a combined approach combining normative, typological and sociological approaches. The first of them revealed both problems in the field of fertility promotion policy, maintaining a long and healthy life of citizens, and successes in increasing the medical and physical activity of the population. Using a typological approach, the differentiation of the regions of Russia in accordance with the dynamics of the position in the grouping according to the ratio of the components of population change is confirmed. We conclude that the demographic policy of the RF constituent entities that have improved their situation or maintained positive population dynamics can be assessed as effective, while regions that have worsened their position or maintained negative population dynamics can be assessed as insufficiently effective or ineffective. In the course of applying the sociological approach, we found that the policy of supporting families with children proved to be effective for less than half of the respondents, however, there is a favorable trend of increasing the importance of supporting families with children for the realization of the reproductive intentions. The paper confirms that bans and restrictions are the most effective measures of the state anti-alcohol and anti-smoking policy, but estimates of the effectiveness of measures vary depending on the presence of bad habits, the fact of attempts to combat them and their success.