Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 4 – The number of
Russians who consider themselves poor is now three times greater than officials
say and constitutes half of the population, according to a new study by Moscow’s
Higher School of Economics on ‘Factors of Absolute and Subjective Poverty in
Contemporary Russia.”
Rosstat acknowledges that the number
of Russians in poverty has increased, Anastasiya Manuilova reports in today’s Kommersant, but the official agency
continues to dramatically understate the number of Russians who feel themselves
poor, the Higher School study reports (kommersant.ru/doc/3288897).
At present, the
Higher School scholars there report, just over half of Russians – 50.3 percent
-- say they feel poor. At the same time,
they note that “every other objectively poor [Russian] does not consider
himself poor but every third non-poor one, on the contrary, considers that he
lives in poverty.”
If objective measures of poverty
reflect low pay and unemployed or underemployed family members, subjective
ones, the scholars say largely reflect the presence of children in the family
or the lack of the ability to live as one would like. Those who have low levels
of education are most likely to say they are poor; women and elderly much less
so.
And the gap between objective and
subjective poverty is especially characteristic of the young, a pattern that
over time means that these differences will make it ever more difficult for the
government to provide assistance in ways that will overcome poverty in the
Russian Federation.
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