William Davidson Institute Working Papers Series
Опубликовано на портале: 03-12-2003
Simon Commander, Andrei Tolstopiatenko, Ruslan Yemtsov
William Davidson Institute Working Papers Series.
1997.
No. 42.
Among the many popular images of the Russian transition, none cast a more dramatic
shadow than the apparently rapid transformation of an entire system from one characterised
by low inequality and largely absent poverty to one marked by extremes of deprivation
and prosperity. Once hailed as a salutary contrast to the extremes of well-being
so characteristic of many economies at comparable levels of income, Russia now exhibits
the tell-tale inequities that mark, for example, many Latin American economies. How
accurate is this representation, both in its depiction of the situation pre-transition,
let alone the consequences of recent changes? This paper is an attempt to answer
these questions in as precise a manner as possible.
The paper is organised as follows. Section 1 gives a brief description of the datasets
— primarily the six rounds of a large household survey, the Russian Longitudinal
Monitoring Survey (RLMS) - that we use in this paper. Section 2 sets out the initial
conditions that obtained in the Former Soviet Union and Russia and the picture that
emerges from use of official statistics. These are shown to be seriously misleading
in a number of key respects. Section 3 deals with the channels of redistribution
that are likely to be present in the transition and surveys the evidence available
from both aggregate data and firm-level information. In Section 4 the key channels
are formalised in a two sector model of transition in which the reallocation of labour
and capital across state and private sectors is seen as the determining feature of
transition. The model is primarily concerned with labour allocation and hence can
provide the paths of inequality and poverty over the transition primarily associated
with labour income. Some simulations are presented which provide a set of simple
benchmarks for understanding the size of likely effects from both within-sector
inequality as also through restructuring and closure probabilities for state firms
and the relative productivity of both state and private sectors. Section 5 turns
to the empirical findings that emerge from a detailed look at the household surveys,
including the factors driving the changes in inequality. Section 6 looks at how stable
the transitions over the income distribution have been and, in particular, takes
a closer look at groups of stable winners and losers. Section 7 turns to the measurement
of poverty and the results that emerge from the household survey regarding both expenditure
and income measured poverty. We also look at the characteristics of the poor. Section
8 concludes.

Опубликовано на портале: 22-10-2007
Steven Stillman
William Davidson Institute Working Papers Series.
2001.
No. 412.
This paper examines the extent to which consumption in Russian households responds to exogenous income shocks. During the time period studied in this paper (1994 - 1998), Russia experienced two major economic crises. Both featured extreme movements in the real ruble-dollar exchange rate. The price of oil, which is typically thought to have a strong effect on the Russian economy, was also quite volatile during this time period. This paper exploits these large changes in oil prices and exchange rates, as well as community-level variations in wage and pension arrears, to identify exogenous shocks to household incomeUsing representative panel data on urban households from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, I find that a household which experiences an exogenous shock of 10% of its total income changes both its food and total non-durable expenditure by 7-11%. Most evidence indicates that these shocks are transitory in nature and thus the traditional Life Cycle/Permanent Income Hypothesis model is firmly rejected as describing the behavior of Russian households. Additional results indicate that changes in household savings are negatively related to exogenous income shocks, with this relationship strongest for low wealth households. Only models of consumption which include precautionary savings motives can explain why poorer households both reduce their consumption and increase their savings in response to an exogenous decline in income

