An average salary: approaches to the index determination

Abstract

The article “An average salary: approaches to the index determination” is devoted to studying various methods of calculating this index, both used by official state statistics of the Russian Federation and offered by modern researchers. The purpose of this research is to analyze the existing approaches to calculating the average salary of employees of enterprises and organizations, as well as to make certain additions that would help to clarify this index. The information base of the research is laws and regulations of the Russian Federation Government, statistical and analytical materials of the Federal State Statistics Service of Russia for the section «Socio-economic indexes: living standards of the population», as well as materials of scientific papers, describing different approaches to the average salary calculation. The data on the average salary of employees of educational institutions of the Khabarovsk region served as the experimental base of research. In the process of conducting the research, the following methods were used: analytical, statistical, calculated-mathematical and graphical. The main result of the research is an option of supplementing the method of calculating average salary index within enterprises or organizations, used by Goskomstat of Russia, by means of introducing a correction factor. Its essence consists in the specific formation of material indexes for different categories of employees in enterprises or organizations, mainly engaged in internal secondary jobs. The need for introducing this correction factor comes from the current reality of working conditions of a wide range of organizations, when an employee is forced, in addition to the main position, to fulfill additional job duties. As a result, the situation is frequent when the average salary at the enterprise is difficult to assess objectively because it consists of calculating multiple rates per staff member. In other words, the average salary of employees is artificially high because it does not include a correction for the intensity of activity or workload of the employee. The offered option of calculating the average salary is similar in nature to the calculation of the salary labor activities based on tariff rates. However, in contrast to the existing methods according to this aspect of research, the correction factor under study is aimed at accounting ratios for the internal and external secondary jobs within the same organization or enterprise. This is the novelty of the conducted research. It appears that the proposed version of calculating the statistical average salary will be more objective to reflect the specifics of remuneration in organizations and enterprises. Consequently, this will allow for a more qualitative analysis in the research of the key socio-economic indexes of living standards of the population and contribute to a more productive work of the government authorities, enterprises and institutions that use the average salary index in their future activities.