Taxing Times for Childless Couples

A government initiative to boost Kazakstan’s population by taxing childless couples is being criticised by the public, who see it as a return to unpopular Soviet-style tactics of encouraging demographic growth by interfering in family life.

The government’s latest initiative was announced late last month, but has yet to come into force. It follows growing concern over Kazakstan’s population, which has been declining steadily for the last decade.

According to the last census, the current population is under 15 million, which is over 2 million less than what it was ten years ago.

“The natural growth rate of the population has dropped almost three-fold over the last 12 years,” said the head of the state agency for migration and demography, Altynshash Jaganova.

Population experts blame the decline on the exodus of ethnic Russians, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The birth rate has also fallen steadily, while the death rate has risen.

The impetus behind the latest proposal appears to have come from President Nursultan Nazarbaev’s annual address in April. In his speech, the head of state set the government the target of bringing the population up to 20 million by 2015.

“We must seriously think about making up for what the country has lost through migration,” said Nazarbaev. “This is a serious problem and the realisation of our plans depends on it. If we do not increase the population by 2015, the economic situation may get complicated.”

However, the proposal has not met with much support on the street, where widespread unemployment and a struggling economy are already making survival difficult. For an increasing number of young Kazaks, finding a place to live is a bigger priority than starting a family.

Almaty housewife Aisha Jumagulova says the new proposals are “essentially a form of extortion: if you don’t have a child, we’ll force you to have one!”

According to Janat Bijanova, a psychologist, “the proposed government initiative is an outdated method of control that belongs to the Soviet past, a direct execution of orders from the top, without having first thought them out or justified them”.

Parliamentary deputy Valentin Makalkin warns that any increase in the population will have serious repercussions on the economy. “The growth rate should not be greater than the growth rate of the economy,” he said, adding that people should only have as many children as they could afford to feed.

Saule Amirbekova, a single mother with one daughter, echoed this view, saying, “I think most young families today prefer not to breed poverty. They do not follow the traditional way, which was to have as many children as God gives.”

Such people could be worst hit by the new tax on childless couples.

Makalkin points out that increasingly ambitious young Kazaks, for whom material wealth is an indicator of success, will take some persuading to start families.

“The most valuable thing for young people today seems to be personal success, shown in the amount of money they have. This is not compatible with the problems that arise when children appear in the family,” he said.

However, supporters of the new scheme point to a variety of urgent reasons for penalising childless couples: from Kazakstan’s national security to its shrinking workforce.

Symbat Nurseitova from the agency for migration and demography said, “Kazakstan is the only country in Central Asia where the birth rate is dropping and the death rate is increasing.”

Sanat Kushkumbaev from the Kazakstan Academy of Sciences adds that Kazakstan could soon begin to feel very vulnerable because of its long borders with China, where the population is booming.

Kazakstan is the biggest of the former Soviet states in Central Asia but it has the lowest density of population.

However, critics of the proposed tax maintain that the population cannot be expected to grow until people are more confident about their standard of living.

Leading Kazak demographer, Makash Tatimov, says he expects the new initiative to do little concrete good, apart from raising the public profile of the falling birth rate problem.

The decline in social welfare since the collapse of the Soviet Union has been cited as another reason why Kazaks are reluctant to breed.

Data from organisations that care for abandoned children shows that their numbers are steadily increasing.

Mira Butabaeva, the head of the public organisation, Gibrat, which provides help to mothers struggling to cope with too many children, believes the government’s resources would be better spent improving conditions for Kazakstan’s kids, rather than pushing people to have more babies.

Saule Beketova from Almaty says women may be more willing to start families if employers did not punish them for getting pregnant. “The right to keep a job during pregnancy has not been established, while women are more and more often the breadwinners in the family,” she said.

Venera Abisheva is an independent journalist in Kazakstan