Ever since Russian legislators enacted the so-called maternity incentive law late last year, I've been wondering how it would turn out. Recently, I've gotten a little bit of a glimpse.

By way of background, last December 27 the legislators approved a plan to create a long-term savings account (similar to our Individual Retirement Accounts in the United States) that would be offered to families who have a second child, or more. The government would deposit 250,000 roubles into the account (a little over $9,600 at current exchange rates), which would grow tax-free. The plan is to increase the size of the initial deposit over time based on inflation. The idea behind the maternity incentive accounts is to jump start Russia's flagging birth rate, which together with its rising death rate, have dropped it into a demographic crisis.

So how's the new law panning out? A report from a newswire that covers Krasnoyarsk territory said Friday that 1,752 people have applied for a maternity incentive account since the beginning of the year. According to the Newslab report, some 1,100 requests have been approved and the rest are being reviewed. But there was a note in the story that caught my eye. A spokeswoman for the territory's pension fund indicated that not all the people who would be eligible for the account had applied for it.

Hmmm. A check of the demographics of Krasnoyarsk Krai, which covers a swath of central Siberia from Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean, indicates it has a population of about 3 million. So having fewer than 2,000 people applying for what was to be a key population incentive does not sound all that promising.

Or maybe it's just this region. According to RIA-Novosti, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev said earlier this month that almost 490,000 babies were born in Russia in the first four months of 2007. That's a 5% increase from the same period for 2006. Medvedev told a national conference on socio-demographic issues that Russia would be spending around 95 billion rubles ($3.7 billion) during 2007 on improving its demographic outlook. That spending will rise to 500 billion rubles ($19.3 billion) by 2010.