ВЕКОВЫЕ ТЕНДЕНЦИИ НЕРАВЕНСТВА ДОХОДОВ В РОССИИ: СРАВНИТЕЛЬНЫЙ АНАЛИЗ СТАТИСТИЧЕСКОЙ ДИНАМИКИ

Abstract

The article classifies and appraises the long time series on income inequality in Russia/USSR developed over the past 25 years. It discusses various issues of the source studies and methodological problems that arise in the process of constructing such series and their interpretation. Trends in dynamics of income inequality identified in the works under review, are compared with other findings from topical research literature. In particular, the author argues as overestimations the values of indicators of income and wealth inequality in pre-revolutionary and post-Soviet Russia proposed in the study by T. Piketty and his disciples F. Novokmet and G. Zucman. Their values of income inequality during the Soviet period are questioned as underestimated. At the same time, our evidence supports their findings as regards comparability of inequality level in recent times and at the beginning of the 20th century, that is adequate for institutional environment of a market economy at the stage of early industrial modernization. The paper argues extensions of the long time series by recent values and revision of selected estimates from the works by D. Didenko and his coauthors. In one case, what is at issue is the series of “white- vs blue-collar workers in industry” wage differential per 1 year of education in organized forms. The indicator is considered as a proxy for income inequality based on human capital theory and supported by relatively reliable statistical evidence for the period from 1913 to 2019. In another case, the author proposes wage inequality series for the period 1968–2019 by linking the corrected estimates from research literature on the late USSR and the data from Rosstat. The former group is revised upwards thus capturing the effects of nonmonetary privileged benefits of the elite. Some promising lines in future developments of long time series on the topic are indicated.