Population-related Policies in Estonia in the 20th Century: Stages and Turning Points

Abstract

This article is about the experience of population-related policies in Estonia. During the recent decade much has been published on this theme, usually with an analysis of currently enforced regulations. Repeated amendments of legal norms and procedures, which are inevitable in a period of fundamental reforms, however, tend to limit their value quite rapidly. Against such a background, this paper applies a longer perspective with an attempt to cover the main stages and turning points in the development of population-related policies in the country since the establishment of statehood in 1918. In the interwar period, the efforts to build up a modern nation included setting up relevant institutions and regulations in the ? eld of population-related policies. These undertakings have been seldom discussed in the recent publications. Somewhat similarly, the postwar decades are frequently regarded as fairly distant and of little relevance to present challenges. To understand the developments, however, the longer view should not be neglected. Todays concerns are rooted in the arrangements and disarrangements of the past, and no less importantly, such continuity is strengthened by the nature of population development and the ? ow of cohorts which absorb the in? uences of the societal environment and carry them along through their lifetime. The article is structured in four sections focusing on the development of marriage and the family, children and fertility, the pension system and social welfare, and the health care system. In each section, the aim is to outline successive policy regimes and their main characteristics in terms of objectives and methods of regulations. Understandably, limited space does not allow coverage of minor changes and technicalities, so for more speci? c information the article provides further reference to various source materials.

Social Science Genetics and Fertility

“…These environmental changes occurred in specific time periods in each country. In order to test for gene-environment interaction in our analyses, we split where early AFB had been strongly promoted through political incentives when the country was still of the Soviet Union prior to 1990 (Katus, Puur, & Põldma, 2004).…”

Why did children grow so well at hard times? The ultimate importance of pathogen control during puberty

“…More interestingly, the post-war decline in infant mortality coincided with the rapid deterioration of living standards after 1947, which was partly caused by the destruction of the rural economy by mass-collectivization [ 18 ]. Culmination of the health crisis in post-war Estonia is indicated by the absolute number of recorded deaths that peaked in 1946–47, a pattern uncommon in the rest of Europe [ 21 ]. The study period thus involved two opposite trends in the economic and epidemiological situations: increasing birth-time economic hardships during the war and particularly in the post-war period, and decreasing infant mortality after 1948.…”