The Russian economy is a continuous championship in searching for sources of rent. The winners can be found both in Forbes lists and in investigations published by anti-corruption activists. But there are almost 145 million ordinary participants.

It’s a paradox: if you rent out an apartment, this is a service and is recorded as an increase in GDP, but if you live in it yourself, it is not. Statisticians, of course, are aware of and have been playing with the concept of imputed rent for a long time. In some countries, it is already taken into account when calculating GDP (and adds a few percentage points to it). In Russia, the problem with the cadastre is still hampering us, but when - and if - it is resolved, another one will arise - Muscovites.

Housing in the capital is approximately three times more expensive than the national average. That is, the average Muscovite (20 sq. m., 1 thousand rubles per meter per month) accounts for 240 thousand rubles of imputed rent per year, 160 thousand rubles more than the average Russian. Multiply by 12 million residents, we get 2 trillion rubles, approximately 2.5% of GDP in additional imputed rent in Moscow.

And also like this: the average per capita cash income of Muscovites (about 55 thousand rubles per month) is twice as high as the Russian average. This is another 3% of the capital's GDP "super income". The quotation marks are here because it is not entirely clear: in Moscow they pay more for the same work or more productive and qualified work.

The estimates, of course, are absolutely “napkin” in terms of the order of magnitude; Rosstat - I know first-hand - would rebel against them with all its might.

But they are extremely useful as an illustration of the fact that “metropolitan rent” is not a cheap story at all. And the fact that the advantages of living in a huge city are something that can be measured in money. By the way, there are many advantages. First of all, this is access to the benefits of civilization: a more or less decent education system, medicine, culture and entertainment. The overly centralized state ensured the hyperconcentration of modern life in Moscow for decades.

It also “took care” that the capital’s rent was not spread evenly over the entire population of the city. Most of the benefits - although formally public - never reached the “those who came in large numbers”, the “limiters”, and even ordinary residents. For example, today, as in Soviet times, in universities that provide access to social elevators, the share of golden youth is disproportionately large. It’s just that earlier these were the children of the nomenklatura, and now the elite.

The latter is also an example of rent - administrative. Not only in the capital. All over the country, at state expense, officials are creating, say, clinics with more or less decent conditions. They are publicly accessible only formally, but in fact access to their services is preferential.

Another example of rent - also administrative, although I prefer the definition of “tax”: in Russia all companies are “equal, but some are especially equal.” Somehow you have to pay all the taxes, but somehow miraculously manage to hide part of it from the Federal Tax Service. More precisely, of course (knowing the specifics of the work and protection of the “cash out” business and “gray” schemes), it would be to say: allowed.

It’s more complicated with a “napkin”: estimates, for example, of the collection of VAT and personal income tax (receipts from them in 2014 amounted to 2.3 trillion and 2.7 trillion rubles, respectively) can be found very different. But if we assume that we are talking about an extremely moderate 70%, the tax rent turns out to be no less than 1.5 trillion rubles.

Most of it, of course, goes to business owners, operators of criminal schemes and their “roofs,” but a couple of tens of millions of ordinary recipients of “gray” salaries also “share.” And they don’t see this as a problem. Not to mention the fact that in Russia, it seems, even at the expert level there was no detailed conversation about either the dangers of rent-seeking behavior or the true scale of such behavior. Despite the fact that Nadezhda Petrova and I were unable to fit half of what we know about the problem into the “note + editor’s column” design.

MAXIM KVASH

How many rentiers are there in Russia?