It's no secret that in Russia there is a huge gap between the rich and the poor. Why do some people become billionaires while others become poor? Why is the state of affairs regarding wealth inequality getting worse and worse? How can the situation in Russia be improved?
Sad statistics
Every year, the Swiss bank Credit Suisse makes a report on the economic and social development countries of the world (Global Wealth Report). This year in the Russian Federation there is an even greater gap between rich and poor people. According to statistics, about 100 billionaires control a third of all Russia's assets. At the same time, we have a very large number of dollar billionaires (4th place, after the USA, Germany and Great Britain).
It does not take a genius to understand the poor socio-economic situation of citizens. At the same time, the middle class dominates in most civilized countries, which is logical. In Russia, the number of people below the poverty line is greater than the number of people in the middle and rich classes combined.
An interesting fact: the number of dollar millionaires in Russia is extremely small compared to other countries. In Russia, about 2,000 people have more than $50 million. And in the USA there are 40,000 of them. Such a distribution of money between social classes as in Russia, it is typical for developing countries such as India, Brazil, Mexico, etc.
European analysts characterize wealth inequality in Russia as a "parody". It was assumed that during the transition period, Russia will improve the system of social protection, efficient economy and labor legislation. Instead, the state of affairs in Russia regarding wealth inequality is only getting worse every year.
Who is guilty
In fact, the situation in Russia could be much worse. Western analysts do not take into account the fact that Russia had poor starting conditions. Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia began to accumulate capital. This is necessary to maintain the economic order. Most European countries the initial accumulation of capital took hundreds of years. Russia is still a young state.
The only way to quickly accumulate capital and economic basis, it is necessary to adjust the economy to the formation of an export-raw material economy. No matter how they scold oil, without its sale, Russia would be at a low level of development. The oil needle is needed to support life. And because of the peculiarities of the raw material export model, the apparatus of the raw material oligarchy is being formed. Wherein a large number of people remain unused in this area. That is why there is such a gap between the rich and the poor. However, this is still wrong...
The system is now such that the extraction of raw materials allows you to quickly and efficiently form funds Money. The state should control this area well, and therefore it has the maximum impact on the commodity market.
How long it will be going on
It makes no sense for the state to change the existing raw material export system. As long as there is oil in Russia, and as long as the price of raw materials is stable, Russia will not change the existing system. If it happens that oil falls in price or runs out, then Russia will urgently begin to change the economic and social model of the state. That's when property inequality will begin to come into balance between the rich and the poor. But the system will change for a long time and with “victims”.
If Russia ceases to produce / sell oil, then the country will begin a wild shortage of funds. Hence inflation and other joys. As a result, it will happen that after 20 to 50 years of long suffering, the economy will improve. This leads to the next question: “Are the people of the country ready for this?” “Does the state dare to break a bad system (but still a system) in order to create a good one (but with some risk)?”
What do we have to do
The most reasonable approach is to start making changes now (or better, yesterday). Russia is trying to develop agriculture, industry, innovation, and so on. We just don't see results.
Russia can help a lot progressive taxation. Those. tax rate grows according to your earnings. Then the rich will pay large taxes, and the poor and middle class will pay small taxes. So you can balance the system a little. In some countries, progressive taxation has allowed the middle class to become the backbone of society. However, one should not be naive to believe that such taxation will be a panacea for Russian wealth inequality.
As a result, we come to the conclusion that property inequality will persist as long as Russia has an export-raw material system. But there is no need to be sad about this. Now there are liberal conditions of employment. This means that everyone can be part of the middle class. To do this, it is enough to work hard and work hard.
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HOW TO MEASURE social - property inequality? Of course, the distribution of personal incomes of the population, as is done in most countries of the world. However, in a country where value equivalents have lost their price coordinates, where wages do not serve as a measure of labor, and where consumer goods and services can exist in complete isolation from the quality of real life goods, it would be rash to define wealth inequality in this way.
DIFFERENTIATION IN CONSUMPTION
So, in 1986, in our families of 4 people with an income of 260 rubles. per month, meat and meat products were consumed almost 3 times less than in families of the same composition with an income of 900 rubles.
In the United States as a whole, per capita food consumption in the top 10% of American families is only 10% higher than in the poorest 10%. (Another thing is the quality of this meat - cheap chicken or expensive veal steaks.)
In most modern countries, a whole system of redistributive measures (taxes, social benefits, payments and benefits) has been introduced, which lead to a significant reduction in the final inequality in consumption. At the same time, taxes are levied on a progressive scale: the higher the amount of income, the higher the tax rate. Benefits are paid to the really needy.
In our country, the real inequality in the standard of living, even taking into account public consumption funds, remains very high. In terms of the share of OFP in the gross national product, we are significantly behind all developed countries of the world: in 1987, the USSR - about 20%, the USA - 28.5%. But even these minor international standards funds are distributed very unevenly. A disproportionately large part of them is consumed by high-income groups of the population.
In addition, differentiation in the consumption of goods and services is exacerbated by profound differences in the volume, availability, and quality of goods and services distributed through a common and closed network. According to data published in Pravda, only 0.04% of the population of one of the regions of the Non-Chernozem region, represented by employees of the apparatus of the regional committee, the regional executive committee and their families, consumed from 56 to 100% of delicacies.
Long-standing efforts in our country to raise the living standards of the poorest segments of the population, in particular by raising the minimum wages, are presented by many economists as "leveling". This is a fundamentally wrong statement, since these measures were aimed at raising consumption standards for the majority of the country's population to the level of physiologically necessary norms, and not at reducing inequality.
Inequality in the situation of the elderly is growing. The average size of the state pension, as you know, is now 84 rubles.
At the same time, we also have an elite in the form of 500,000 personal pensioners. Their high level of provision consists of the amount of personal pensions (up to 500 rubles) and a whole range of high-quality services and benefits provided to them.
In addition, the overwhelming majority of personal pensioners are former high-ranking and highly paid employees who, over many years of work, have accumulated significant material values(apartment, car, cottage).
In total, in the upper stratum of the multimillion-strong detachment of pensioners in 1987 there were about 750 thousand people, or 1.6% of their total number. However, only a tenth of them (about 0.2%) can be classified as "Soviet-style" very wealthy. Their personal wealth is 100-1000 times greater than the property of 16 million old-age pensioners who received less than 60 rubles in 1987. per month.
BET ON "MIDDLE"
One can try to compare the degree of property inequality in terms of the distribution of personal property. In the USSR in 1985, the average amount of personal property per family was 7.3 thousand rubles, including 11.6% for transport, 31% for wardrobe items, and 28% for cultural and household items. .2%.
In the United States, according to a 1984 survey, the average American family's personal property was valued at $32,700. What did it consist of? Own housing accounts for 40% of the value of all property (2/3 of families live in own houses, 1/3 - rents, average usable area per person - 48 m "sup" 2 "/sup"), savings accounts and various securities - 25%. The rest was for cars, jewelry and household appliances.
As we can see, neither in terms of volume, nor in quality, nor in composition, nor in the structure of accumulated property, American and Soviet families can be comparable. Naturally, they cannot be compared in terms of inequality in the distribution of accumulated property.
So? in the US, 12% of households with a property of $125,000 accounted for over a third of the country's total personal property fund, and 0.5% of the richest American families accounted for 22%. At the same time, 26% of low-income families (less than $900 a month) owned less than 10% of the country's net wealth, indicating very high inequality, much higher than in the Soviet Union.
However, if we try to compare the comparable, that is, take into account personal, non-capitalized property, it turns out that our inequality is higher. Wealthy citizens - the Soviet equivalent of the American "middle class" - include all persons with personal cars - 13 million people, or 11.2% of all families in the Soviet Union. It is about these citizens that we can say that, in general, according to real standards of consumption, they belong to the wealthy segments of the population, having a complete set of apartments (houses), modern housing furnishings, cars, in many cases a second home (cottage), i.e. those items that are considered mandatory attributes of the "middle class" throughout the world. The small number of car owners who are not included in this group is quite compensated by families who, although they do not have a personal car, have high standards of living.
For comparison, we point out that in most developed Western countries the share of this socially and class heterogeneous group is 70 - 50%, in the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary - 40 - 50%.
The phenomenon of the "middle class" plays an extremely important role in the political and economic life modern countries. This large group stabilizes the political life of the country, serves as a kind of guarantor of democracy (and not only bourgeois democracy), pushing various extremist movements and groups to the periphery of public life. At the same time, the consumer demands of the middle-income strata largely determine the development of the economy, the structure and pace of its growth, and the technical renewal of production.
"PLUM
As for the super-wealthy or “rich” by the standards of our life, this category includes people who not only have a lot, but have something that is in principle inaccessible to the vast majority: power, access to special distributors and high-quality goods and services.
Representatives of science (academicians and corresponding members of the Academy of Sciences who do not have high posts), art, culture and sports, and foreign workers should also be included in the category of the super-wealthy. Their high incomes, fees, foreign trips compensate for their lack of special distributors. Although very often these faces are attached to some of them.
According to the author, this group includes about 400 thousand people. Taking into account the representatives of the "new rich" from among the cooperators, individuals, as well as the underground rich will lead to an increase in the size of this group by about 100 thousand people.
Thus, less than 0.25% of the country's citizens live by standards that are practically inaccessible to the rest of the population.
In this regard, it should be recalled that the number of millionaires in the United States currently exceeds 1.5 million people, or 0.6% of the population. The U.S. equivalent of our ultra-wealthy group would not be just millionaires; and the so-called "owners", whose personal fortune was estimated at 2 - 10 million dollars. In the mid-80s. they also made up 0.25% of the total US population.
It should be borne in mind that the comparison of these two groups is very conditional. In our country we are dealing with a status elite based on the concentration of status and undeniable power, in the US with individuals who have achieved wealth in the process of capital accumulation.
The vast majority of the wealth of the American rich is represented in the form of stocks, bonds, securities, which serve only as titles of property. A commercial failure or personal bankruptcy can immediately reduce such "paper" wealth by several times. That is why personal rotation among representatives of American millionaires is quite high, and even higher among billionaires: in 1986, out of 49 super-rich people, only two retained the title of billionaire since the 50s (D. Rockefeller, E. Hunt).
Of course, American millionaires live richer than the Soviet elite, but our "nomenklatura" can be quite proud of the stability of its ranks.
Only an insignificant part of the fortune of American "owners" (10 - 25%) falls on capitalized property, enclosed in objects and goods. It is no coincidence that, constituting only 0.25% of the total population, they concentrated in their hands 82% of the total US capital held in bonds, securities, stocks and trust funds, while at the same time - only 0.5% of the property in the form of personal homes, 0.8% of term deposits and cash. 2.2% - in the form of durable goods. In other words, in terms of "ordinary" property, the gap between American millionaires and the rest of the population of their country was quite comparable with the inequality between the "super-wealthy" and other citizens in our country.
Yes, and in terms of accumulated monetary savings, we cannot boast of great equality. In 1986, the average deposit amounted to 1,361 rubles. However, if we consider that 7 out of 8 citizens of our country do not have salaries at all, then the average size savings amounted to about 7 thousand rubles. (in 1987, about 8 thousand rubles). In addition, among the depositors themselves there is a very strong inequality. Indeed, among them are numerous contingents of workers who receive wages and pensions through savings banks.
A rather large category of citizens occupies a special place in the distribution of the population by standard of living, which gravitates towards the upper group in terms of access to quality goods and services. This includes tradespeople and Catering, logistics and marketing, procurement, housing public utilities. In total, about 17 million people, or 6% of the country's population.
About how the deficit turns into personal benefits for those who control it, data from selective surveys of the State Statistics Committee speak: the expenses of trade workers are 60% higher than their official income, in one of the republics, 70% of foreign-made cars belong to trade and service workers.
According to their property status, these persons are presumably distributed as follows: one tenth, or 1.7 million people, belongs to the "rich" group, two-fifths, or 6.8 million people, to the "middle class", the rest 8.5 million people - to the top of the low-income.
Thus, the social and property pyramid in the Soviet Union looks like this: "rich" - 2.3% of all families (of which only 0.7% have legal sources of income and property), middle-income elephants - 11.2% of families, half of which achieved prosperity on the deficit, the poor - 86.5%.
Such a distribution is very conditional and satisfies only one requirement: it meets the criterion of the absolute level of consumption of personal goods, albeit remotely, but approaching international standards.
If we take into account only personal property that has a use value (excluding capital), then the corresponding structure in the United States would look like this: 3% rich. 17% - secured. 60% - average and 20% - low-income. Approximately the same picture is observed in other developed countries.
The degree of wealth inequality in our country is much higher than in developed countries. The main reason is the hypertrophied scale of poverty and the rudimentary size of the middle-income strata.
The building of a healthy, just socialist society is unthinkable without the elimination of feudal vestiges in the "status" distribution of goods. The development of political democracy in our country would create the prerequisites for complete economic calculation. Under socialism, this would help to reduce the boundaries of both the official property elite and the underground bandocracy, and would create favorable conditions for expanding the social and political base of the renewed society - the Soviet "middle stratum".
A. ZAICHENKO, Candidate of Economic Sciences
Even during the Mesolithic, some families in a number of ways (number, individual qualities, the condition of their activities) turned out to be higher than other families. It was these families that took away a greater amount of surplus product - the main factor in the emergence of property inequality.
From the very beginning, the excess product was almost impossible to accumulate, but it was used as a way to increase their own authority and increase their popularity.
The richest families could influence the poorer families, they gave them food, and in return they received their support.
The settled way of life was also a key factor in the formation of property inequality. With the advent of agriculture, there is a division of labor, some of the most influential families no longer have to be engaged in the extraction of food, they led those who obtained these products.
Property inequality gave rise to social differentiation of society and specialization. In addition to the extraction of products, more honorable and easier activities appear. Among these occupations was the leadership of the entire economic activity, and then the social life of society. Some take up religious activities. It began from the fact that people wanted to somehow encourage the most useful occupations and gave a certain circle of people a significantly higher position in society.
As the population grew, the need for everyone to work was exhausted, a certain circle of people could now only deal with administration.
Such people not only had strong influence and prestige among their community, but also received economic and social benefits or privileges. So people accumulated much more property than others - hence the inequality of property.
From that moment, the decomposition of primitive society began, classes began to be created. People who had a higher rank in society received a significantly larger amount of surplus product than everyone else.
Special privileges were received not only by the richest members of society, but also by those who possessed special individual qualities and, of course, the most useful to society. Even greater advancement on the social ladder could be achieved by arranging feasts, holidays, and only the richest could afford such a family. Thus, only a small number of persons could increase their position.
In addition to all this, ancient people believed that a person’s wealth was due to the favor of gods or spirits towards him, which means that such people had to occupy a special place. The prestige of the owner of wealth thus grew substantially. Such people usually had the support of other members of the community.
It is then that the most influential and wealthy members of the community take over the management of this community. Such people are the first step from property inequality to the social differentiation of society. The richest in terms of property, as a rule, occupied the highest rung in the social pyramid of society. In turn, those who occupy the highest position in society have even greater opportunities for the subsequent accumulation of property. Thus, the top of society was formed, subordinating all power to itself, and as a result, the birth of the first state began.
Thus, the emergence of property inequality gives rise to social differentiation, and that, in turn, further exacerbates property inequality.
In the processes of world production, an important place belongs to the distribution of income received by households. To measure income inequality, the statistical method of dividing the population into equal shares - desplies and quintels (1/10 and 1/5 of the studied population) is widely used. The measurement includes a comparison of income in the top, middle and bottom groups. The distribution of income by deciles, quintels reflects the degree of income differentiation and concentration levels
The purchasing power of the population.
Intercountry income levels. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were changes in the distribution of incomes by groups of the world population. The top five deciles increased their share of income mainly due to rapid growth income in China and India, given their place in the world population. As the PRC moved from the top decile to a higher one, income growth in the first decile slowed down. In the early 1990s, this decile was defined by the populations of sub-Saharan Africa and Bangladesh.
Due to the decrease in per capita income, the sixth to ninth deciles have reduced their shares. The seventh decile, which includes the population of middle-income countries, mainly Latin America, lost about one point. The population of oil-exporting countries is concentrated in the ninth decile, their share in world income has decreased by three points - from 27 to 24%.
The bottom decile of the world's wealthy increased its share of income due to the relatively strong economic growth in the US.
In general, the top and bottom deciles increased their shares, while the front groups decreased. Differences between deciles remain significant. Despite significant growth in the top five groups of the world population, per capita income does not exceed 10% of the world average, and only 1.25% of per capita income in the top group (Table 16.1).
Dividing the world population into five groups of 20%, according to other estimates, the share of world income attributable to the richest quintile increased from 1965 to 1990. before. 83%. The share of other quintels decreased. In 1965 average income per capita in the richest quintile was 31 times more income in the lowest quintile, and in 1994 - 78 times more. For comparison, we note that total income The 582 million inhabitants of the least developed countries in the top decile are almost 8 times less than the combined wealth of the 200 largest billionaires, which was estimated at $1,135 billion in 1999.
One way to analyze personal income is the construction of the Lorenz curve (Fig. 16.1). The horizontal axis ranks income earners by share groups in relation to the entire population - usually in deciles or quintels. The vertical axis plots the shares of total income received by each group. The end of each axis is 100% and they are equal. The graph is enclosed in a square, and a diagonal passes from the lower left corner to the upper right. At each point on the diagonal, the percentage of income received is equal to the share of the population receiving it. This is the line of equality in the distribution of income. Each percentage group of income recipients gets exactly the same percentage of total income (Figure 16.1).
There is not a single country in the world in which there would be complete, ideal equality in the distribution of income, therefore the Lorenz curve is always located to the right of the diagonal coming from the lower left corner. The more unevenly income is distributed among percentage groups of the population, the more the Lorenz curve is curved towards the horizontal and right vertical axes.
Most often, relative income inequality is shown as the Gini coefficient, or Gini concentration coefficient. It can be calculated by dividing the area between the diagonal line and the Lorenz curve by the area of half the square in which the given curve lies. The Gini coefficient is a cumulative, aggregated indicator and can vary from 0 to 1. An indicator equal to zero means complete equality of the population in the distribution of income, while an indicator equal to one means complete inequality in the distribution of income. Thus, the higher the value of the Gini coefficient, the greater the level of inequality in the distribution of income in the country. In countries with uneven distribution income coefficient ranges from 0.5 and above, and in countries with a relatively even distribution of income - from 0.20 to 0.35.
Gini coefficient indicators, as well as comparisons of income shares per tenths or fifths of the population, show a widening gap in the distribution of world income. In 1960 it was 0.44, in 1989 it was already 0.55.
Property inequality in subsystems. The gradation of income recipients shows a much deeper wealth inequality in developing and Eastern European countries than in Western countries. The gap between the poorest and richest 20% of the population in Western countries is six times, and in developing countries- almost ten times. In the 1990s, the gap between the poorest and richest
The groups decreased slightly in industrialized countries, while in developing countries it remained at the same level.
In developed countries, levels of inequality have declined over a long historical period. In developing countries, as per capita income increased, inequality in the distribution of wealth increased. In Latin America, the inequality in income distribution at the bottom and top floors of the pyramid is deeper than in all developing countries. The poorest 20% of the population accounted for 3-2.5% of income, and the richest 5% of the population accounted for 30-33% of income, i.e. the gap was 11-12 times. In the 1990s, in many Latin American countries, the income of the richest 20% was 15 times that of the bottom quintile, and in Brazil it was 26 times, and the deciles were 53 times (1996). Similar trends were observed in countries with relatively low level income. In general, the general directions of changes in the distribution of income in developing countries do not confirm the thesis of S. Kuznets that inequality in the distribution of income in the early stages of development increases and then begins to smooth out.
The persistence, and in a number of countries, the deepening of inequality does not change the property status of a significant part of the population. A stagnant or falling income share of the lower groups is sometimes accompanied by a reduction in their income in absolute terms. The problem of income distribution both between countries and within countries, especially developing countries, is one of the sharpest contradictions in the world. Economic policy based on growing inequality in the distribution of income, or the persistence of such a situation, is contrary to development.
Previously, separate concepts have argued that greater income inequality can have a positive impact on the economic growth by redistributing income in favor of the rich, who save it, while the poor do not. This view assumes that higher growth can be achieved at the cost of greater inequality.
Practical experience has long shown that less inequality can increase production efficiency and economic growth. As income gaps close, healthcare and workforce education challenges are being addressed
