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To: long-gone who wrote (15081)	7/31/1998 6:54:00 PM
From: goldsnow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116758

Economics not only cause of shorter Russia lives 10:37 a.m. Jul 31, 1998 Eastern By Patricia Reaney LONDON, July 31 (Reuters) - The life expectancy of the average Russian fell by more than six years in the early 1990s because of social factors, crime, income inequality and vodka, public health experts said on Friday. While health has improved markedly in Poland and the Czech and Slovak republics since the start of the decade, the dramatic decline in Russia is unprecedented, there and in other industrialised countries. ''All of the former Soviet Union has demonstrated a broadly similar pattern,'' Professor Martin McKee, of Londons European Centre on Health of Societies in Transition, said in an interview. McKee, along with colleagues in Sweden and Russia, examined the socio-economic factors of Russian's transition from a socialist to market-led economy to discover why it had been accompanied by such a severe decline in health. In a study published in the British Medical Journal they found that the greatest falls in life expectancy had been in some of the wealthiest regions of the country, suggesting that there was more to the matter than poverty. Between 1990 and 1995 life expectancy fell by 6.3 years for men and 3.4 years for women, and though the trend started in the late 1980s, 1992 was a particularly severe year. ''The regions with the largest falls were predominantly urban, with high rates of labour turnover, large increases in recorded crime, and a higher average but unequal distribution of household income,'' the researchers wrote. Most of the fall in life expectancy was due to more deaths of people aged between 30 and 60 years old and the major contributing factor was heavy consumption of alcohol. Deaths of children or the elderly did not contribute to the change. The researchers found that diet and smoking, which played a crucial part in the long-term trend, could not account for recent changes, nor could the deterioration of the health-care system. ''There is a whole chain of causation. What we have tried to do in the paper is say you've got to look at the socio-economic factors but then you also need to look at the immediate factors. Alcohol comes in as a major factor as the final link in the chain,'' McKee explained. The researchers concluded that the rapid pace of change, low social cohesion and inequality lead to a decline in health, which in Russia is worsened by alcohol consumption. ''It is not just impoverishment and we shouldn't depend on economic recovery in Russia to bring about improvements in health. We need to look at other factors such as instability, fear of change, change itself and crime as a marker for a certain social cohesion,'' McKee said. ''It may be that you can intervene at a number of points and you don't just have to wait for economic recovery.'' Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited

To: long-gone who wrote (15081)	7/31/1998 6:57:00 PM
From: goldsnow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116758

Russia plagued by market crisis and debt 03:06 p.m Jul 30, 1998 Eastern By Peter Henderson MOSCOW (Reuters) - Blackouts plague Russia's far east but lights burn bright at the Finance Ministry in Moscow as Russia battles two crises, one in the markets and one in the real economy. The government is fighting for its fiscal life to repay crushing debts that could sink the stagnant economy, but it also must enact reforms meant to spur companies first to pay taxes and secondly to pay each other. Russia feeds itself from its dachas -- country houses where workers unpaid for months spend their weekends growing potatoes to tide them over until companies pay their wages. The economy has yet to get back on its feet after half a decade of crisis. There is a lot to pay. Factories and firms owed overdue arrears of a startling 1.07 trillion rubles ($173 billion) in June, 4 percent more than in May, including 70 billion rubles ($11 billion) in overdue wages. Most Russian companies limp by, selling a tenth or a fifth of their wares for cash, bartering for supplies and building up arrears to employees and other firms with nowhere else to go. Meanwhile, in Moscow's shiny new office towers, young turks make grim jokes about the markets, watching stock major indices which have lost almost two-thirds of their value this year. ''I didn't guess this would happen,'' said one shocked young economist at a Western firm in Moscow. He and his colleagues have an office sweepstake on when the ruble will slip out of control. ''The most popular dates are not far away,'' he said. A stable ruble and low inflation are the clearest and widest indicators of confidence in the government. The ruble's post-reform strength is the result of the central bank's refusal to print money or give baseless credits to industry. During 10 months of crisis there has been no run on the banks, indicating some popular belief in the government, though Russians have tucked away at least $20 billion in hard currency, the largest hoard of U.S. dollars outside the United States. The crisis is in the markets where nervous foreigners threaten to take home funds they have invested in Russian ruble debt, up to a third of the $65 billion market. However, the key is not the size of Russia's total debt, less than 50 percent of gross domestic product, but when it is due. ''If you look at the numbers in Russia, they're not frightening,'' said Mohamed El-Erian, head of European emerging market research at Salomon Smith Barney investment bank. ''The big question is how do you deal with the maturity of the debt.'' Russia has issued mostly short-term t-bills, which has proved a nightmare since chill Asian winds swept into the country, upsetting investor confidence and sparking a home-grown crisis. About two-thirds of Russia's ruble debt is due within a year and the government, which already spends every third ruble on debt payments, would double the debt in no time if it rolled over $40 billion at current rates of over 70 percent. If it could not repay or manage the debt, it might have to freeze it, or simply start up the ruble printing presses. The government has bought itself time to impress investors and improve its own finances by rescheduling about $4.4 billion short-term debt. That leaves about $12 billion falling due within three months, the window in which the anti-crisis program of Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko must start to bite. ''November is the first month when we should get full returns from all of the newly introduced taxes and balance the budget,'' he said after getting an International Monetary Fund promise of $11.2 billion in new aid this year. An IMF-agreed plan calls for second-half federal revenues to rise by 25 percent against the first half to 161 billion rubles. Taxes have already been raised, spending cut, and now Russia and investors are waiting for the government to get tough. ''Weaknesses in implementation have been the Achilles heel of Russia's economic policies in the past,'' said Stanley Fischer, the IMF's deputy managing director. The tough new head of the State Tax Service, former banker Boris Fyodorov, has said Russia should gather most of its taxes from personal income tax. More than half the population don't pay taxes. The IMF agreed for now that Russia should create a special unit for large taxpayers, especially those with major arrears such as Gazprom, the largest natural gas company in the world and Russia's largest taxpayer. Gazprom owes the federal government about $2 billion in tax arrears. It promised to pay $650 million cash a month, beginning in July, after the government seized Gazprom property. If Gazprom fails to pay up, and unofficial sources say it won't, the government has threatened seizure again. But Gazprom is not simply a company that refuses to pay taxes -- it also keeps the country going by supplying natural gas, without getting paid, to companies and the government. Such tangled webs keep the lights flickering in the far east. Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.