Rosstat’s methodology may overestimate the growth of real wages

The peculiarities of the statistics can explain not only the rapid growth of capital investment (see Kommersant of September 5), but also the noticeable increase in wages recorded by Rosstat. Bloomberg Economics experts believe that 2 percentage points of the 10.5% increase in wages in June 2023 compared to June 2022 can be attributed to a bias in the sample of companies surveyed by statisticians. According to them, over these 12 months, the cumulative monthly growth in real wages was smaller – 8.8%.

The shift occurs due to the non-circular nature of the real wage index, Alexander Isakov, the author of the calculations, is convinced. “The index is circular if we get a similar increase, not by accumulating the “increase”, but by comparing its value in the last and first days of the period,” he explains. The expert notes that June 2023 is not the first month of such a gap, it has been happening for the past year and a half.

The reason for the gap between the monthly and annual growth rates of real wages is that they are calculated for a comparable range of organizations in the current and base period: for companies that are being studied today and existed a month ago (in the case of growth month by month) or a year ago (in the case of an annual comparison). Alexander Isakov notes that the sampling bias, which led to such noticeable distortions, is not due to statistical shortcomings and is a useful indicator of structural transformation – companies that cannot withstand wage races leave the market.

The negative contribution of sampling bias in June was the highest since the early 2000s and has been growing since mid-2021. “I think that from the point of view of the inflation forecast, the annual increase in wages overestimates the pressure on prices, and month by month it more adequately reflects the situation and income growth,” the economist concludes.

In Rosstat, Kommersant promised to study the findings of Bloomberg Economics. If the expert’s calculations turn out to be reliable, Rosstat will have to reassess the dynamics of not only wages and incomes, but also the level of poverty, which, as statisticians reported yesterday, largely due to the rapid annual growth in real wages, fell to 10.8% in the second quarter of 2023 th from 12.1% in the second quarter of 2022.

Artem Chugunov