The fight against poverty only needs money – Newspaper Kommersant No. 67 (7512) of 04/18/2023

New commercial databases of consumer preferences are already allowing economists to test long-established theories about consumer behavior. In one of the latest works, using data from Infutor, economists confirmed a thesis that has recently been often disputed in science: according to their calculations, consumption segregation, which limits the access of certain groups of the population to goods and services, is mainly determined by income inequality, and the level of education , racial affiliation of the consumer, his origin, culture are secondary.

The problem of consumer segregation—the formation of stable bilateral (both on the demand side and on the supply side) patterns of consumption in social groups and in individual territories—has been of interest to economists since at least the 1950s. Effective market competition should break down such segregation (which it rarely does), economic theory suggests that segregation reduces both the amount of goods available to society as a whole and the well-being of segregated groups. But it is expensive and difficult to test exactly what causes segregation at the level of consumption, which has contributed to the emergence of groups of theories according to which segregation is primarily promoted by cultural factors, including the social origin of consumers. On the other hand, mainstream theory (not without a near-Marxist accent) suggests that the key factor in maintaining consumer segregation (other forms, such as geographic ones, are better studied) is income and property inequality, and nothing else.

Economists Corina Boar from New York University and Elisa Jannon from the Barcelona CRIE Center for the first time tried to fully test hypotheses on the material of the United States not on official statistics, but on de facto longitudinal data of the commercial sector – a private database Infutor, which has been consolidating since the 1980s, and in some cases (real estate) since the 1950s, open data on real estate ownership, transactions with it, car purchases and a number of other expenses of US citizens. Infutor, as Boar and Jannon found, is a near-perfect “gatherer” of marketing data for a maximum of 250 million US residents (relatively detailed data is about 150 million). The dynamics of consumer segregation, primarily in the sales of cars and houses, Boar and Jannon could analyze over the past 15 years, and since 2019, the Infutor database, which was updated earlier once a year, has been updated for the most part on a monthly basis.

The conclusion of the work, the preprint of which was published yesterday by the NBER, is not very effective, but quite reliable: Boar and Jeannon convincingly demonstrate that the main factor in consumer segregation is income difference, racial factor plays a much smaller role in the US, other variables are insignificant. Accordingly, consumption segregation is highest in the richest “city of contrasts” New York, and lower in income-homogeneous and relatively poor Wyoming. For Russia, we note that confirmation of the often disputed thesis could be important in determining strategies for combating stagnant poverty in the regions, if this confirmation were demanded by anyone: both the digitalization of the Federal Tax Service and the informatization of private retail in the Russian Federation could already be given for quick verification of assumptions in this regard, information resources comparable to those that were almost accidentally discovered by Boar and Jeannon in the United States.

Dmitry Butrin