Kazakhstan is headed for a baby boom, followed by baby 'bust', a Kazakh demographer told the local Karavan Weekly media outlet Friday, Central Asia Newswire reported.
"The baby-boom will hit Kazakhstan in 2012-2015," the Interfax news agency reported Makash Tatimov as telling Karavan.
At the peak of the boom, women of the ethnic Kazakh group will have given birth to three babies each.
Although the high birth rate is being buttressed by strong fertility rates among other Asian ethnic groups in the country, the forthcoming boom will not reach the record heights reached in 1987 when 417,000 new babies were registered, he said.
This is partly because the country's sizeable ethnic Russian group peaked earlier and is now in decline.
"In 2023-2024 the birth rate will start moving downward," Tatimov told Karavan.
"The demographic shift will imply dramatic ageing of the population, when the low birth rate will fail to compensate for high mortality," he said.
The life expectancy for Russian and Ukrainian men currently is the lowest among gender and ethnic groups in Kazakhstan, with death taking 58-59-year-olds. The main reasons are their propensity to bad habits and disregard for their own health, according to the demographer.
Uzbek and Uighur women live longest, achieving an average age of 73-74 years, owing to their traditional values, he said.
Nevertheless, the higher number of mortalities will drag the overall statistics south.
"By the end of the century, in 2090-2100, we will start dying out as all European nations (are)," he said.