Consumer Aspects of Poverty Measurement: Russian Practice and International Experience

Abstract

The subject area of the research in this article is the existing methodological framework and approaches applied in Russian and international practice to establish boundaries that determine the property status of the population. The topicality of the research is determined by the features of the approach used in Russian practice of poverty measurement, based on the comparison of per capita income with per capita cost of living, which, with a rather simple calculation scheme, has a number of shortcomings that limit its application in constructing integrated assessments of a population’s standard of living. The purpose of the research is to analyze the features of measuring the level of poverty based on consumer characteristics of households. The research tasks are connected with identification of the most problematic aspects of the current practice of measuring the level of poverty in the Russian Federation, determination the factors that may affect the results of measurements, and assessment the impact of these factors on the quality of indicators developed by official statistics. Special attention in the research is paid to the analysis of international organizations’ recommendations and foreign experience in developing a system of indicators that characterize various aspects of the population’s property status, building of appropriate estimates taking into account the standardization of households’ consumer characteristics, as well as indicators that complement the basic monetary characteristics used in measuring the population’s level of poverty. Based on the systematization of the most promising developments in this area, implemented in foreign practice, proposals for improvement the existing approaches to measuring the level of poverty in Russian statistics are formulated, and new research directions in the field of methodology for building comprehensive estimates of the level of poverty as an information basis for developing effective measures of targeted social support for the most problematic groups of the population are identified.