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Trajectories of the Middle Class’s Evolution in Modern Russia

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The Middle Income Group in China and Russia

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Abstract

The issues of middle class in Russian society are covered in many research papers by Russian and even foreign scholars.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See e.g.: Kivinen (2004), Avraamova (2008), Belyaeva (2007), Srednie classy v Rossii: ekonomicheskie i sotsialnye strategii [Middle Classes in Russia: Economic and Social Strategies]/Ed. Maleva T.M. Moscow: Gandalf Publishers, 2003; Tikhonova (2009), Avraamova (2014), Belanovsky and Dmitriev (2010), Sredniy klass v sovremennoy Rossii. Opyt mnogoletnikh issledovaniy [Middle Class in Modern Russia. Summary of Many Years’ Worth of Research]/Ed. Gorshkov, M.K. and Tikhonova, N.E. Moscow: Ves Mir, 2016; et al.

  2. 2.

    The history of studying the middle class, as well as Western authors’ points of view on the issue are described in detail in the following paper: N.E. Tikhonova, S.V. Mareeva Sredniy klass: teorii i realnost [The Middle Class: Theories and Reality]. Moscow, IS RAS, 2009.

  3. 3.

    Russia Economic Report. World Bank. Russian Office. March 2014, Issue 31.

  4. 4.

    Birdsal et al. (2000), Cárdenas et al. (2011), Kharas (2010), López-Calva and Ortiz-Juarez (2014), Meyer and Sanchez-Paramo (2014), Meyer and Sanchez-Paramo (2014). World Bank. Russia Economic Report. No 31; Pew Research Center. (2015). The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground: No longer the majority and falling behind financially. Washington, D.C.: December. (at https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2015/12/2015-12-09_middle-class_FINAL-report.pdf), Vakis, R., Jamele, R. & Lucchetti, L. (2015). Overview: Left Behind: Chronic Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean. Washington, DC: World Bank. License: Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0 et al.).

  5. 5.

    Ravallion (2010), Ravallion et al. (2009).

  6. 6.

    To learn more about the scholars that work within the absolute approach to defining the middle class, see Anikin V., Lezhnina Y., Mareeva S., Slobodenyuk E., Tikhonova N. Income Stratification: Key Approaches and Their Application to Russia. NRU HSE. Series WP BRP/PSP “Public and Social Policy”. 2016. Issue. WP BRP 02/PSP/2016.

  7. 7.

    Milanovic and Yitzhaki (2002), Kharas (2010), Pew Research Center. (2015). The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground: No longer the majority and falling behind financially. Washington, D.C.: December. (at https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2015/12/2015-12-09_middle-class_FINAL-report.pdf), et al.

  8. 8.

    Barro (2000), Easterly (2001).

  9. 9.

    Solimano, A. (2008). The Middle Class and The Development Process: International Evidence. Santiago, Chile: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Mimeographed document.

  10. 10.

    Rose, S. (2016). The Growing Size and Incomes of the Upper Middle Class. Urban institute. Research report June 2016. (at https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publication-pdfs/2000819-The-Growing-Size-and-Incomes-of-the-Upper-Middle-Class.pdf).

  11. 11.

    Atkinson and Brandolini (2013), Grabka and Frick (2008).

  12. 12.

    To learn more about the key authors specializing on the relative approach to the middle class, see Anikin V., Lezhnina Y., Mareeva S., Slobodenyuk E., Tikhonova N. Income Stratification: Key Approaches and Their Application to Russia. NRU HSE. Series WP BRP/PSP “Public and Social Policy”. 2016. Issue. WP BRP 02/PSP/2016.

  13. 13.

    Anikin and Tikhonova (2016), Tikhonova (2017).

  14. 14.

    Pre-industrial poverty is the oldest type of poverty that humanity ever faced. It has two main varieties: mass rural poverty and poverty in marginalized urban communities at the times of intense urbanization. Pre-industrial rural poverty stems from the low efficiency of natural or semi-natural agricultural production. In turn, the classic version of pre-industrial poverty in marginalized urban communities, which goes back to the history of developed European countries in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, is caused by uncontrollable mass migration to cities from overpopulated rural areas at the dawn of industrialization and urbanization (for more on the subject, see: Tikhonova and Anikin (2014).

  15. 15.

    UNU-WIDER, World Income Inequality Database (WIID3.4)’, URL: https://www.wider.unu.edu/database/world-income-inequality-database-wiid34 (accessed on: 25.03.2017).

  16. 16.

    As UNU-RIDER shows Gini data from a number of sources, there are several different annual figures; thus, we calculated the average for every given year.

  17. 17.

    Russian Federal State Statistics Service. “Distribution of the General Volume of the Money Income and Characteristics of the Differentiation of the Money Income of the Population”. URL: https://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/population/bednost/tabl/1-2-2.doc (accessed on: 25.03.2017).

  18. 18.

    To learn more about the study, go to its official websites: https://www.issp.org and https://www.gesis.org/en/issp/home.

  19. 19.

    It is worth bearing in mind that this approach sets the lowest threshold of the middle class at 10 US dollars (based on PPP).

  20. 20.

    Anikin (2016).

  21. 21.

    Tikhonova, N.E. Stratifikatsiya po dokhodu v Rossii: spetsifika modeli i vektor izmeneniy [Income Stratification in Russia: Specific Features of the Model and Direction of Changes] // Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost [Social Sciences and Contemporary Age]. 2017. Issue 2. P. ….

  22. 22.

    FSSS, Central Statistic Database, Gini (Income Concentration), URL: https://cbsd.gks.ru/ (accessed on: 17.03.2017).

  23. 23.

    If you wish to compare the overall picture to the results of data aggregation in specific regions (with the median in mind), please consider these sources: Anikin V., Lezhnina Y., Mareeva S., Slobodenyuk E., Tikhonova N. Income Stratification: Key Approaches and Their Application to Russia. NRU HSE. Series WP BRP/PSP “Public and Social Policy”. 2016. Issue. WP BRP 02/PSP/2016 and N.E. Tikhonova. Income Stratification in Russia: Specific Features of the Model and Direction of Changes. In: Social Sciences and Contemporary Age. 2017. Issue 2. P. 23–35.

  24. 24.

    The chapters written by the Russian contributors to this book are based on different corpora of empiric data, which are described in the Appendix. This particular chapter relies on the data bodies of the RAS Institute of Sociology surveys dating back to different years. The methodology used for compiling the selection was similar for all surveys, which allowed us to place the bodies of data along a unified time scale, following the data compatibility principle.

  25. 25.

    We have based our calculations of actual average per capita income with the use of FSSS data on indices of consumer prices for goods and services, URL: https://www.gks.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosstat_main/rosstat/ru/statistics/tariffs/# (accessed on: 23.03.2017).

  26. 26.

    The figures may be slightly different in other data corpora, but regardless, they also show a decrease in the number of people with high income. The Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, in particular, shows that, since the time before the 2008–2009 crisis, the size of the high-income groups has shrunk from 15 to 9% (see Chap. 6).

  27. 27.

    The Monitoring data also confirms this patterns (see data in Chap. 6).

  28. 28.

    Like the size of the middle class, the size of low-income groups is characterized by a clear correlation to the country’s economic environment: it grows after each economic crisis and shrinks during the period between crises.

  29. 29.

    For more information, please refer to: N.E. Tikhonova, S.V. Mareeva. Sredniy klass: teorii i realnost [The Middle Class: Theories and Reality]. Moscow, IS RAS, 2009; N.E. Tikhonova. Sotsialnaya struktura Rossii: teorii i realnost [Russia’s Social Structure: Theories and Reality]. – Moscow. Moscow, Novy Khronograf: Institute of Sociology RAS, 2014.

  30. 30.

    To learn more about the economic crisis’s impact on the Russian middle class and to see why it did not cause the middle class to shrink, despite the deteriorating standard of living, consult the following: Sredniy klass v sovremennoy Rossii. Opyt mnogoletnikh issledovaniy [Middle Class in Modern Russia. Summary of Many Years’ Worth of Research]/Ed. Gorshkov, M.K. and Tikhonova, N.E. Moscow: Ves Mir, 2016.

  31. 31.

    It should be noted that the upper mid-income groups are characterized by a larger “overlap zone” with the “multi-criteria” middle class: by the end of 2015, 64% of people from these groups could be described as the middle class under the above approach. By contrast, in the lower mid-income groups, the “overlap zone” reached only 46%.

  32. 32.

    To learn more about the way mid-income groups and specific subgroups identify themselves, go to Chap. 7.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. HSE University, Institute of Sociology of FCTAS RAS, Moscow, Russia

    N. E. Tikhonova & A. V. Karavay

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  1. N. E. Tikhonova
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  1. Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China

    Peilin Li

  2. The Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

    M. K. Gorshkov

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Tikhonova, N.E., Karavay, A.V. (2021). Trajectories of the Middle Class’s Evolution in Modern Russia. In: Li, P., Gorshkov, M.K. (eds) The Middle Income Group in China and Russia. Research Series on the Chinese Dream and China’s Development Path. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1464-4_2

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