25 Years of Monitoring Income and Living Standards of the Russian Population

Abstract

The article is devoted to understanding the results of 25 years Of monitoring of income and living standards of the population (hereinafter-Monitoring) in post-Soviet Russia. Monitoring began in 1995 in connection with the disorganization of the economy in the early 90's of the last century and the need to respond to the negative consequences of rapid growth in prices and tariffs and changes in consumer consumption, which have a pronounced regional specificity. The objects of Monitoring and its conceptual framework are presented. The article describes the main blocks of its indicators: generalizing, social standards, labour and employment, monetary income, social support, spending and consumption, socioeconomic differentiation, including a total of 79 indicators and indices, and shows the methodological basis for their calculations. The main attention is focused on the analysis of the values and dynamics of qualitative assessment indicators, which are a comparison of statistical primary and analytical values with criteria standards – social standards of current consumption and their monetary equivalent. These include the development of a system of consumer budgets for the population of different levels of material security: the subsistence minimum, the socially acceptable / minimum consumer budget, and consumer budgets of medium and high affluence. The article analyzes the values and dynamics of purchasing power of per capita monetary income, the social structure of the population by the level of material security, and interregional differentiation of income and living standards at key points in the period 1995-2019. The prospects for the development of Monitoring, which the article associated with the continuation of its unifying role in the study of the values and dynamics of indicators of income and standard of living, with profound economic and social differentiation of the population based on social standards, income, housing, quality of employment, etc., as well as testing new indicators to complement social data of the state statistics in the sensitive areas of revenue generation and standard of living, taking into account unstable (precarious) employment, digitalization of the economy, changes in the sources and structure of payments provided by social protection of the population.