There is no money, we saved them all – Newspaper Kommersant No. 225 (7426) dated 12/05/2022

Discrepancies in numbers are always a cause for concern, but the general distrust of any statistics, primarily sociological, based on such discrepancies, deprives us of the main advantage of this heterogeneity – the possibility of stereoscopic observation of reality. The author happened to observe the last example of this series during the regional conference “Regions of Russia: results of the year and development prospects” organized by Kommersant last Friday in the role of a moderator, which is quite interesting, since, as it turned out, regional “optics” gives an unusual and very heterogeneous picture recession / recession / crisis in the Russian economy since March 2022. Perhaps it’s just a matter of optics: in a different role, I would have missed the slide at the presentation of the GR director of VTsIOM Igor Rodin, who described the results of a completely ordinary and regular survey of the population about preferences in savings.

Those who were interested, for example, in the situation with inflationary expectations in the Russian Federation (and they are measured for the Bank of Russia on a monthly basis by the company inFOM), are familiar with their constant discrepancies between groups with and without savings. Few people constantly follow the ratio of the number of these groups, “offhand” for many years they have been correlated as 30–35% of people who have savings (or rather, declare it) and 60–65% of people without savings. Meanwhile, in the September poll by VTsIOM, with a question and audience almost the same as inFOM, only 43% of respondents reported no savings and 53% – presence (3% found it difficult or refused to answer). Surprised, I checked the latest estimates of Infom: no, that’s right, in this survey for the Central Bank, 62% of respondents confidently reported that they do not have savings, 35% – that they do, 4% declined to answer.

The ratio is important, the difference is critical – one could search for who is wrong, it would be stupid, but fun. One could also be satisfied with sociological banality: any difference in the design of the survey (up to a comma in the questionnaire) has a strong and unpredictable effect on the results, dozens of parallel polls on savings in the Russian Federation since 2001 give completely different figures. And this is a reason to look at other figures from the same polls and study the dynamics. In the VTsIOM survey, for example, I was struck by the willingness of the Russian population to save in the Hong Kong dollar (1% of the audience, in the euro – 3%, in the dollar – 8%: have you ever seen the Hong Kong dollar?), As well as regional distribution – more than all residents of the Ural and Southern Federal Districts, but not the Central Federal District. A careful study of the VTsIOM polls is most interesting in terms of the dynamics of the population’s assessment of how much to consider as savings. Against the backdrop of stagnation in real incomes, in surveys for the Central Bank, the share of those who consider savings less than 80 thousand rubles is falling sharply, and the number of those who believe that savings start at 150 thousand rubles is rapidly growing. This already looks like a meaningful, albeit complex and non-obvious answer.