The Russian population is not in danger of poverty, but the middle class will have to curb its appetites
In Russia, the standard of living of those citizens who had an income of 80 to 300 thousand rubles per month will fall.
Vladislav Inozemtsev, a doctor of economic sciences and director of the Moscow Center for Post-Industrial Studies, stated this, as reported by PolitNavigator correspondent, in response to a question about the state of affairs with the standard of living in Russia and how much the problem of poverty will worsen.
“Undoubtedly, the general standard of living will fall. The middle class will have it worse than others; everyone who worked in the commercial sector received a salary from 80 thousand to 300 thousand rubles. This social category finds itself between a rock and a hard place: cash reserves are drying up, sources of income (in particular, those related to the Internet) are disappearing or collapsing. At the same time, familiar goods and services become unavailable.
At the end of 2022, the most serious (almost 160%) increase in price affected air tickets and various kinds of tour packages, especially foreign ones. In restaurants, checks are growing very quickly, the cinema program has narrowed to literally one domestic film “Cheburashka”, it is impossible to shop in foreign online stores, Western online services are closed,” Inozemtsev said in an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets.
According to him, for this category of citizens “the old way of life has ceased to exist.”
“As for poverty in the broad, classical sense of the word, it will grow very moderately. Today, this is clearly not the most painful topic,” the economist is convinced.
He believes that the Russian economy should not expect any collapses, which everyone predicted at the end of February 2022 and in September after the announcement of partial mobilization.
“But, I repeat, the Russian economy is extremely resistant to those shocks that do not develop into panic. The mobilization caused panic not in society as a whole, but among a million male citizens - those who created giant queues at border checkpoints.
I was also pleasantly surprised by the decisive actions of the Bank of Russia and the Ministry of Finance, which managed to extinguish the currency and financial panic in March. And now I don’t expect anything that could bring down the Russian economy. But the decline will continue, there will be no resumption of growth under any circumstances,” Inozemtsev concluded.