Date and Time
June 10, 2009
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
Christina Gathmann

Between 1989 and 1994, life expectancy at birth in Russia plummeted by more than 6 years for men and 3 years for women.  Termed the "Russian mortality crisis," the proximate cause of this surge in mortality is commonly thought to be a large increase in alcohol consumption, particularly among Russian men in their 40s and 50s.  Many observers attribute the mortality crisis to difficulties associated with Russia's economic and political transition.  In this paper, we suggest a different explanation.  Observing that the transition immediately followed the end of an unusually successful anti-alcohol campaign conducted under Gorbachev, we instead suggest that the surge in alcohol-related deaths may have been spurred by the end of the campaign.  To investigate this explanation, we provide new evidence on two specific questions: first, did Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign reduce mortality? Second, can the end of the campaign account for the dramatic increase in mortality in the early 1990s? In answering these questions, we build on a novel dataset of all Russian oblasts from 1970 to 2005. Our findings suggest that the campaign had a substantial impact on mortality but cannot fully explain the crisis: the end of the campaign explains 49% of the mortality crisis between 1990 and 1992 but only 5% of the increase in 1993 and 1994.