Increasing convergence or divergence of the most important demographic parameters triggers irreversible socio-economic processes associated with the search for a new equilibrium in the markets of labor, consumer goods and public goods. Therefore, much attention is paid to the study of variation in total fertility between countries and regions. At the same time, studies of age-specific fertility differentiation are relatively few and lack comparable spatial and temporal coverage. The article analyzes the dynamics of variation in age-specific fertility rates for the most important five-year age groups of Russian women living in urban and rural areas. The spatial and temporal cross-section of the study covers 79 regions in 1993–2022, with a detailed breakdown into two periods of fertility growth and two periods of fertility decline. We performed the analysis using linear trends within the periods of fertility growth and decline, which corresponds to the mainstream approach to the study of the phenomenon. We determined the age-temporal and spatial-temporal regularities of the dynamics of fertility variation in the post-Soviet period. The age-temporal pattern of fertility variation is formulated as a decrease in the size of variation as the age of women giving birth increases. The spatial and temporal regularity is reduced to the fact that the processes of club convergence and divergence of fertility are more pronounced in rural areas than in urban areas, and in groups of regions distinguished by the size of fertility in real generations of women than in groups of regions distinguished by the administrative division of the country’s territory. The research results helped to refine the data accumulated in the literature based on the variation in total fertility
Keywords
urban fertility, rural fertility, fertility in Russian regions, fertility differentiation, age-specific fertility rates, post-Soviet Russia, sigma-convergence, coefficient of variation, comparative analysis