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Measuring changes in the Russian middle class between 1992 and 2008: a nonparametric distributional analysis

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Abstract

Since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Russia is generally acknowledged to be one of the most complicated countries in the world, from a sociological perspective. In particular, the evolution of the Russian middle class is an interesting but highly complex phenomenon. Most works dealing with this issue are based on summary statistics, which do not fully convey all the information on income distribution. In the present paper, we analyze the evolution of the middle class in Russia from 1992 to 2008, by applying a nonparametric tool, the “relative distribution,” to Russian household incomes. The relative density function is a proper density function which compares two distributions observed in different years, in order to describe patterns of differences on the entire income scale. Despite a stable pattern of high inequality, we found that after a period of income convergence characterized by a rise of the middle class, in 1998 Russian households income started to polarize and in 2008 one can observe a very high degree of polarization and a marked decrease in the middle class. This shrinking of the middle class affected particularly incomes below the median. Our results can be related to the social reforms and can be partially explained by the characteristics of the Russian labor market.

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Notes

  1. Survey conducted by Higher School of Economics and ZAO “Demoscope” together with Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Institute of Sociology RAS. RLMS-HSE sites: http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/rlms-hse, http://www.hse.ru/org/hse/rlms.

  2. Available at http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/prices/potr/2009/I-ipc91-08.htm.

  3. See for a discussion on this topic: http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/rlms-hse/project/samprep.

  4. This scale assigns a value of 1 to the head of the household, a value of 0.7 to each additional adult and a value of 0.5 to each child (until age 17).

  5. Actually, the aspects of the relative Probability Density Function and Cumulative Distribution Function as a basis for a comparative analysis were examined earlier by, for example, Parzen (1977, 1992), Cwik and Mielniczuk (1989, 1993).

  6. Mielniczuk (1992) and Parzen (1994) investigated the links between the relative distribution and the Kullback–Leibler measure of divergence.

  7. We used the reldist function in the reldist package available in the R Archive network (R Development Core Team 2012).

  8. Results are available upon request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics and Business Administration, Ariel University, Ariel, Israel

    Zoya Nissanov

  2. Department of Statistical Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Maria Grazia Pittau

Authors
  1. Zoya Nissanov
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  2. Maria Grazia Pittau
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Correspondence to Zoya Nissanov.

Additional information

We would like to thank the Associate Editor and an anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments. We also thank, without implicating, Jacques Silber, Raphaël Franck and Roberto Zelli for their support and for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. Finally, special thanks the “Russia Longitudinal Monitoring survey, RLMS-HSE,” conducted by HSE and ZAO “Demoscope” together with Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Institute of Sociology RAS, for making these data available.

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Nissanov, Z., Pittau, M.G. Measuring changes in the Russian middle class between 1992 and 2008: a nonparametric distributional analysis. Empir Econ 50, 503–530 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-015-0929-8

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