The goal of the paper is to assess changes in the regional differentiation of life expectancy in Russia for 2003–2017, to consider the features of the level and growth rate of life expectancy, gender differences in the indicator, the difference between urban and rural areas, the structure of mortality due to death, the level of infant mortality in the regions of Russia; the paper also defines regional reserves for further increase in life expectancy. The relevance of the topic is due to significant regional differentiation, Russia’s significant lagging behind developed countries, and the goals associated with this field. We arrange Russian regions into nine groups with annual intervals of the indicator and evaluate the changes in the groups in 2003–2017. We find out that in the conditions of growing life expectancy there has been a marked convergence of regions; they approached the Russian average level according to this indicator. Regional convergence has occurred at the expense of the extreme groups in terms of the indicator, and primarily due to the lagging regions getting closer to the leaders; i.e. we observe the catch-up nature of convergence. This suggests that over the period of 2004–2017, the relatively easy-to-implement life expectancy growth reserves, which are typical for low-indicator regions, have been used quite well, while further growth in high-indicator regions is not an easy task, since the possibilities of first-order factors, such as gender differentiation, the difference between urban and rural indicators, the share of mortality from external causes, and infant mortality rate, have been largely implemented. Nevertheless, all nine groups of regions still have reserves to increase life expectancy, due to certain growth factors of the first order. The groups with the most unfavorable level of the indicator have the greatest reserves. However, factors such as the lag in the rural indicator and the value of infant mortality in the group with very high life expectancy provide opportunities for further increase due to growth factors of the first order
Keywords
life expectancy, grouping, infant mortality, russian regions, regional convergence, first-order growth factors, gender differentiation, differences between urban and rural settlements, causes of death