Paul Goble
Staunton,
February 5 – In May 2018, Vladimir Putin said his goal was to reduce the number
of people living in poverty by 2024, a worthy goal to be sure but one almost
impossible to achieve because of the difficulties of providing everyone with a
decent income and because the state and the society understand poverty differently,
Yevgeny Gontmakher says.
Even
if everyone agrees on the goal, the Moscow economist and commentator says,
there are difficulties in establishing the necessary metrics and in collecting
the data needed to see where Russians are at any particular point (mk.ru/economics/2019/02/05/arifmetika-rossiyskoy-bednosti-oficialnoe-chislo-nishhikh-zanizheno-v-dva-raza.html).
But even if these metrics and this
effective measurement are in place, Gontmakher points out, “the state and the
population understand what poverty is in completely different ways.” Moscow came
up with a state definition in 1991 when Gorbachev introduced the concept of a
minimum consumer budget. Under its terms, about 15 percent of all Russians were
poor.
A year later, after the disintegration
of the USSR, that share jumped to more than 50 percent; and so Yeltsin changed
the poverty line, introducing complexities that had the effect of allowing the
government to say that far fewer people were poor than in fact were, the
economist continues. That tradition has continued under Putin.
With the new definition of poverty in
place, Moscow overnight was able to reduce the number of poor people it said
Russia had by 50 percent. Unfortunately, this kind of playing with definitions
by state officials has remained the dominant Russian approach. If one used the
1991 definition now, about 25 percent of Russians would be classed as poor.
But that figure, twice as high as the
one Kremlin officials announce, is still too low because Russians’ understanding
of what they need not to be poor has changed over time. What would have been
viewed as a worthy life 40 years ago would now be seen by most as the direst
form of poverty.
The European Statistical Agency is
one of the institutions that has tried to come up with a modern definition of
well-being. It says that nine material “goods” are to be considered the normal
basis for a life above poverty. These include eating meat every day, having a
car, television, telephone, the chance to take a week-long vacation and savings
to pay for the unexpected.
The Russian state statistical agency
refuses to use such a measure of well-being and hence of poverty because if it
did the share of Russians who would be classified as poor would skyrocket. It would be “much higher than 25 percent” and
thus an embarrassment to the powers that be, Gontmakher says.
Polls confirm that: 50 percent of
parents say they have financial problems, only 36 percent have savings, 40
percent of the population doesn’t have enough to pay for food and clothing, and
70 percent of Russian families now live on the edge of financial disaster. And
what is especially worrisome, only a third of Russians have funds to invest in
their future, gain access to medical care, and take part in cultural life.
Russians with such problems see themselves
not as living but as surviving. And
their ideas about poverty are fundamentally different than those dreamed up by
better-off bureaucrats, the economist says.
Poverty in modern countries must be defined not by officials but by a consensus
of the population.
Consequently, Gontmakher says, “attempts
of the current Russian government in its running after ‘optimization’ and ‘improvement’
in the methods of defining poverty are condemned in the best case to a lack of
understanding by society” which has its own ideas about what poverty means at
any particular time.
It is time for everyone in the
government and outside it to understand, the economist and frequent critic of the
powers that be says, that “Russian
social policy can become genuinely effective only when it becomes part of a
democratic process.” Anything else is playing at arithmetic games which fool no
one.
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