Poverty In Post-Soviet Russia: Development Dynamics By Household Income Source

Abstract

The fundamental scientific challenge the ways to the solution of which are presented in this article, is to clarify the mechanisms of poverty alleviation among the population of Russia. One of the important aspects of measuring poverty in post-Soviet Russia is the presence of a persistent bias, which is expressed in the structure of incomes of Russian households where there is a large share of hidden incomes, which are estimated by official statistics at the macro level, but their sources and distribution among households remain poorly understood. Assessing the impact of hidden incomes on poverty alleviation seems to be an urgent problem. The purpose of this work is to explain the changes in the structure of relative poverty of Russian households caused by various components of their disposable resources, including the latent income component. The initial data are presented by the information from the project “The Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey – Higher School of Economics” for 2000–2018. Household disposable resources became indicators of well-being. Poor households are those whose per capita disposable resources were less than 50 % of the median. The research methodology is based on approaches to measuring relative poverty, which makes it possible to decompose it through a comprehensive analysis of its level and structure. Poverty decomposition was carried out for the components of household incomes, which make up their total disposable resources, by determining the marginal contribution of each component to the reduction of total poverty.