Goodbye, the living wage!

The Ministry of Labor has created a working group to revise approaches to poverty assessment in Russia. This was stated by Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova, speaking at the panel discussion “Social Triad: Demography-Employment-income” as part of the Gaidar forum. Work on new standards will be conducted by the department together with social partners and parliament. This is not about radical transformation, but about the gradual improvement of the standard. The first results should appear by the 2020 year.

“We have to comprehend in a new way the approaches to assessment of poverty, its measurement, to switch to more modern standards. Now, as a rule, the absolute is used: poverty as an attitude to the standard of living standards,-cites the words of the Deputy Prime Minister RBC. “This is an approach that is based on the living wage standard.” Golikova drew the attention of participants in the discussion that the concept of subsistence levels introduced in Russia in 1992 was a temporary solution acting during the period of economic stabilization.

Cheese shop / AGN "Moscow" / Photo: Kiselev Sergey

In December, the Chairman of the Accounts Chamber, Alexei Kudrin, expressed an offer to evaluate the development of the economy, including due to the happiness index, since the GDP becomes an increasingly indicative indicator, giving way to indicators associated with a specific person. Speaking for the addition of gross indicators by others, Kudrin emphasized that some global development indices are associated with the development of freedom or well-being, some with inequality in various fields. Earlier, Minister of Economic Development Maxim Oreshkin announced the growing role of happiness in the economy.

According to the current data of Rosstat, 19.6 million Russians have income below the subsistence level, which is 13.3% of the population. At the end of last year, the Minister of Labor and Social Development Maxim Topilin called the amount for the elimination of poverty in Russia. “We understand that the income deficit, that is, a lack of income so that everyone will receive at the subsistence level, about 750-800 billion rubles,” the head of the departmentsaid . A month earlier, Alexei Kudrin announced that to combat poverty, the state needs to spend at least 10 billion rubles annually. Among the already implemented measures to combat poverty, the head of the counting chamber called the introduction of maternity capital and special benefits for families in which the first child appeared.

Child in the store / AGN "Moscow" / Photo: Kiselev Sergey

Recall that according to last year's May decree of the president, one of the national goals in the development of the country was a decrease in poverty level by half by 2024. The World Bank reacted to such a forecast with skepticism. And Golikova admitted that so far the current measures are not given the opportunity to achieve this, so in 2019 the social block of the government will present additional measures to support citizens.

Starting this year, in eight regions of Russia, pilot projects will start on the personified detection of Russian families living behind the poverty line. For them, it is supposed to develop a "exit trajectory from low -income." Since 2021, they want to deploy this technology throughout the country. In the meantime, Kabardino-Balkaria, Tatarstan, Primorsky Territory, Ivanovo, Lipetsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Novgorod and Tomsk regions take part in the experiment .