Mareeva S., Slobodenyuk E. Stuck in poverty and preserving wealth: Individual income mobility in Russia. The Russian Public Opinion Herald. Data. Analysis. Discussions. 2020. No. 3–4 (131). P. 100–115.

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of individual income mobility of Russians in both objective and subjective dimensions. The empirical base for the research is drawn from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey - Higher School of Economics (RLMS HSE), waves 2014-2017. Following the logic of the relative (positional) income mobility, used, inter alia, in the recently published OECD report, but adapting it to the realities of modern Russian society, the authors turn to the analysis of the scale and directions of individual mobility between income quintiles over a four-year interval. The composition of the groups that remain steadily in the least and most prosperous income positions (“sticky floor” and “sticky ceiling”) is also in focus. A similar logic of analysis is then applied to subjective income mobility - changes in self-evaluation of one's position on the poverty-wealth scale. The results show that the scale of income mobility in Russian society is quite high, which is more typical for the countries undergoing periods of transformation. Income mobility opportunities are influenced by factors of both class and non-class nature, and the high importance of ascriptive factors for sustainable well-being or continuous poverty requires the attention of the state. A subjective assessment of the position on the income scale is even more volatile, with subjective income mobility weakly correlating with income mobility. In the most disadvantaged state in the realm of objective income mobility are families with children, and in the realm of subjective income mobility - pensioners with multiple chronic diseases. At the same time, none of the socio-demographic categories can be unambiguously defined as a zone of localization of immobility by income or self-evaluation, since the situation of individuals belonging to them can qualitatively differ depending on a unique combination of life circumstances.