In March 2020, Vladimir Putin said that 70% of the country's population belongs to the middle class. The President argued that such an assessment is the result of research on the methodology of the World Bank. We checked whether there are such calculations in fact.
On the 20th anniversary of the victory in the presidential election in 2000 TASS agency Recorded A series of short video interviews “20 questions to Vladimir Putin”. In the 16th series of this project, the head of state talked with Andrei Vandenko about the income of the population. In particular, the presenter asked Putin about why a large middle class was not formed in the country. In response, the president said: “Listen, do you know what the middle class is? If you think that the middle class is the way they live in France, in Germany or in the United States, then this is not true. The middle class in each country is different. There is an appropriate methodology of the world bank, it is that the middle class is considered the number of households, people whose income is one and a half times more than the minimum wage. We have such ... the minimum wage 11,280, in my opinion, this year, and the average salary is much higher. We have a lot of such, confidently over 70%. ” When Putin pronounces the last phrase, the explanatory titer appears in the video: "73.1% of citizens have more than 1.5 subsistence levels."
The oncoming question of Putin “Do you know what the middle class sounded during the interview?” worries the minds of economists, sociologists and other researchers for more than a dozen years. For the first time the term Middle Class I used it Back in the middle of the 18th century, the English writer James Bradshaw in the text entitled "Scheme to prevent the outflow of Irish wool to France." Friedrich Engels at the end of the 19th century defined The middle class as people who, in a late feudal society, did not belong to the nobility or the peasants, and then became a new ruling class, that is, a bourgeoisie. The definition, which in one form or another is used to this day, gave The British statistics of Thomas Stevenson in 1913: the middle class is people who are in the hierarchy between the higher and working classes, these are high -class specialists, managers and senior civil servants. According to Stevenson, representatives of the middle class own a significant part of human capital, but at the same time are under the control of elites, which, in turn, own the capital financial. Note that in this definition, belonging to the middle class is not directly related to the receipt of income of a certain value. Although in the next 100 years such studies appeared, their authors still emphasized that belonging to the middle class is determined by different indicators, including non -economic ones.
If you focus exclusively on the economic side of the issue, then Putin’s assertion that “the middle class in every country is different” is relatively fair. The border is held as rudely between developed and developing countries. The same World Bank in one of its reports Offers This difference: the middle class in developing countries are those people who are not poor by the standards of their societies, but are poor in comparison with “American standards”. The authors of the study conducted in 2009 came to the conclusion that in developing countries a person can be attributed to the middle class who spends on average $ 2 to $ 13 per day in the prices of 2005. In the same year, the World Bank issued report About the Russian economy, in which the middle class defined as "households with a consumption level of at least 150% of the national poverty level." The poverty level, in turn, was determined by experts through the subsistence minimum established by the authorities.
Apparently, Putin relied on the last of these documents, making an appropriate statement in March 2020, 11 years after the publication of the report. At the same time, the interpretation of the president is noticeably different from the then presented position of the World Bank. Firstly, we are not talking about any global methodology-we managed to find a statement about 150% only in this report in Russia. Secondly-and the main ones, the Russian president claims that a person can be attributed to the middle class based on his income, while the World Bank determined belonging to the middle class on expenses. If you follow this logic, you can calculate that a middle -class representative in Russia does not earn, and spends a certain amount per month. Accordingly, if you follow the 2009 report until the end, it is necessary not to talk about the minimum wage, but about the cost of living.
In the 2015 report, experts of the World Bank Refused from the determination of the middle class through the excess of the subsistence minimum established by the state. At the same time, they explained that they consider the middle class of Russians who spend at least $ 10 daily, that is, at least $ 300 per month, about 18,500 rubles. At the average rate of the dollar to the ruble for that year. Note that we are not exclusively talking about working people. For example, if a middle -class family consists of parents and two children, this means that their total expenses in 2015 amounted to 74,000 rubles. Monthly (accumulations in this amount are not included). According to the report of the World Bank, there were about 60%of them in Russia in early 2015. "Kommersant" then suspected Organization in manipulations - when calculating the middle class in relation to Russia, the same methodology was used as in analysis, for example, the countries of Central Asia.
Given that the term “middle class” is not defined strictly, there are a variety of estimates of its share in the population. Moreover, most of them are less than Putin’s less than one and a half, two, or even three times, and scientists and experts in their studies rely not only on the level of prosperity, but also on other factors: the level of education, not related to physical labor, the availability of savings and real estate, self -identification, etc. People corresponding to all criteria are included in the so -called middle -class nucleus, and corresponding to only part of the criteria - in it - in its The periphery, although the methodology differs from research to research. In 2015, the Russian Academy of Sciences appreciated The share of the Russian population, which belongs to the middle class nucleus, is 18%, to its periphery - another 26%. Two years later, experts from the Center for Analysis of Revenues and Life standard of Higher School of Economics Published The study in accordance with which the “generalized middle class” is 28.4% of Russians. Another expert from HSE, Professor Natalya Tikhonova, in 2019 appreciated The average class in Russia is 38.2% of the population.
Thus, Putin’s statement was based on the report of the World Bank, issued in 2009, on the Russian report. This document does not propose a certain universal methodology for assessing the middle class, and the definition used by experts proposes to conduct such an assessment not by income, but by human expenses. Moreover, in its subsequent reports, the organization abandoned this approach. Many experts, including Russian ones, evaluate the middle class not only in terms of welfare, and their assessments are much lower than the one that the Russian President called in an interview. Perhaps 70% sounded in the answer of Putin not by chance - in 2008 he He said: “I believe that the minimum strap of middle class in the total structure of the population by 2020 should be a level of at least 60%for us, and maybe 70%.”
Photo: TASS
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