Benefits from poverty – Newspaper Kommersant No. 210 (7411) of 11/12/2022

Since 2018, the proportion of children living in low-income families has decreased by 4.5 percentage points, according to statistics from Rosstat. Simultaneously with the decrease in the level of “child poverty”, the degree of inequality between Russian households with children also decreased. Apparently, this happened primarily due to the introduction in the Russian Federation of additional benefits for children from low-income families – this is indicated by the increase in the share of so-called social transfers in the structure of the population’s cash income.

The level of poverty among families with children in Russia is declining – such a conclusion follows from the results of selective observation of the income of the population and its participation in social programs published by Rosstat (summed up every two years). At the end of 2020, the share of children under the age of 18 who lived in low-income households amounted to 19.1% of the total number of children of this age. Compared to the data for 2019, the indicator decreased by 4.5 percentage points. Note that this is its minimum value since the beginning of observations in 2014 – then the share of “poor children” was 20.7%.

Since 2014, the share of households with children at the bottom of the income distribution has declined, resulting in a reduction in inequality among this population. The share of households with children with an average per capita income two times lower than the subsistence level (0.5 RMS) has almost halved over six years, to 2.2%. With income in the range from 1 PM to 2 PM, on the contrary, it increased – from 18.3% to 21.5%. At the same time, the share of those who lived in households with an income of 2.5 LMS and up to 5 LMS and above decreased from 14.6% to 10.7%.

The decrease in the level of poverty is most likely due to the emergence in the Russian Federation of a large-scale mechanism for the redistribution of income – in the form of a system of benefits for children from poor families under the age of 17.

It began to be created with the advent in 2018 of an allowance for children aged 3 to 7 years – and, obviously, brought to completion by the planned transition from January 1, 2023 to a single universal allowance, which systematizes all payments existing in the Russian Federation to low-income families with children. In 2022, the budgets of all levels will spend 1.7 trillion rubles on this allowance, it will cover about 10 million children.

According to Rosstat statistics, the share of social transfers in the income of households with children increased from 13.8% to 15.5% from 2014 to 2020. Most of it is still expected to come from labor income – although it has decreased slightly, from 82.7% to 81.2%.

In absolute terms, the amount of allowances and compensations that falls on each family member in low-income households with children has almost doubled since 2014, from 1148 rubles. up to 2185 rubles.

At the same time, the total amount of cash income of households over the same period increased from 19.5 thousand rubles. up to 23.6 thousand rubles. per person.

It can be assumed that at the end of 2021–2022, the decrease in the share of “poor children” continued, as the poverty rate of the population as a whole decreased. According to Rosstat, at the end of 2021, the share of the poor dropped to 11%, which is the lowest since 2013. According to the results of the second quarter of 2022, the poverty rate in the Russian Federation amounted to 12.1%, which is 2.2 percentage points (p.p.) and 0.4 p.p. lower than in the first quarter of 2022 and in the second 2021 years respectively. The decrease in overall poverty, according to Rosstat, was also caused by an increase in the volume of social benefits for poor households with children. In April-June of this year, the cash income of the population amounted to 19.4 trillion rubles, and 21.2% of this amount fell on social benefits (4.1 trillion rubles). Over the year, their share in the structure of household income increased by 0.9 percentage points, and compared to the first quarter of this year – by 1.2 percentage points. : in the first quarter of 2022, they decreased by 1.2%, in nine months – by 1.7% compared to the comparable period last year.

Anastasia Manuylova