Moscow has Cut Poverty Rate in Russia Now from 9.1 Percent to 6.7 Percent by Statistical Sleight of Hand

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 17 – Moscow officials and commentators are celebrating what they say has been the halving of the poverty rate in Russia over the last five years to only 6.7 percent. But this decline is largely the result of a sleight of hand by the Russian government’s statistical agency, the To Be Precise portal says.

            This year the portal which investigates Russian statistical data on various questions points out that Rosstat changed the way it counted poverty. Had it used the same approach that it had used earlier, the poverty level would have been 9.1 percent and not 6.7 percent, a decline from 12.4 percent in 2019 but a much less impressive reduction than the one Moscow is claiming (tochno.st/materials/bednost-v-rossii-sokratilas-vdvoe).

            “Until 2021,” the To Be Precise portal says, “Rosstat classified individuals as poor if their income fell below the subsistence minimum—the cost of a minimal basket of essential food, goods, and services. But in 2021, it adopted a new metric: the poverty line,” a threshold set in 2020 to the subsistence level and indexed since that time.” By making this change, the agency was able to claim the greater decline.