More than a third of Russian households do not have enough time for leisure

As researchers from the Faculty of Economics at Moscow State University have calculated, 20–37% of households in Russia face a shortage of free time. “Time poverty” is accompanied by income poverty relatively rarely (about 3% of all households in the Russian Federation experience a shortage of both time and income), but it often reduces people’s ability to care for children, maintain health and develop professional skills, including exacerbating difficulties their way out of difficult circumstances.

More than a third of households in the Russian Federation may experience a lack of free time, which, in turn, prevents them from receiving additional education, taking care of children or health. This conclusion can be drawn from the study “Twice the Poor: Who is Short of Time and Money” by experts from the Faculty of Economics of Moscow State University Irina Kalabikhina and Victoria Shamsutdinova based on the data of Selective Observation of the use of daily time fund by the population of Rosstat for 2019. The survey covered all subjects of the Russian Federation and 45 thousand households (89 thousand respondents). Free time in this work refers to time for leisure (reading, internet, hobbies, sports), education, religious activities, as well as service to society and helping other households.

As the authors of the work note, interest in calculating free time is caused by a new understanding of resourcefulness: if income is the most important material resource, then time is the basic intangible one. Modern poverty research is gradually beginning to take this parameter into account in assessing the state of households – in some families, adults may work so much that they do not have time to meet “home” needs, which reduces the quality of life, as well as the ability to care for health and children.

The authors used several approaches to assess the level of “time poverty.” Thus, the median value of free time per household member over 15 years old on average in the sample was 205 minutes per weekday, but in 20.3% of households the figure was more than half as low. This group mostly includes households of one or two people; 52% of these households have no children, 28% have one child. In most of them (78%) there are no persons over working age, in almost 70% there are men, and in 55% of cases the share of men prevails or is equal to the share of women. With a less stringent time poverty threshold (less than 60% of the median free time for the population), the share of such households increases to 26.8%.

An alternative approach involves comparing each household member’s working hours to one-and-a-half (405 minutes) of the population median (270 minutes). According to this criterion, the share of time-poor households was 37%. This category is also dominated by households of one or two able-bodied citizens, more often men, and 65% of such households have no children. The increase in working time in these households occurs due to a reduction in free time.

The share of households that lack not only time, but also income (below 50% of the subsistence level per person) in the Russian Federation turned out to be relatively small (about 3%), time shortage can lead to a reduction in the welfare and human capital of such households in the future.

Moreover, if since data collection (in 2019), reducing income poverty has become a relatively routine task for the government through the introduction of benefits for poor families (at the end of the third quarter of 2023, its indicator decreased to 10.2%), then reducing poverty by time is probably more difficult. On the one hand, this may involve further development of the infrastructure for caring for children and the elderly, including a long-term care system; on the other hand, an increase in labor productivity, which is difficult to initiate in the economy as a whole.

Anastasia Manuilova