Subjective Poverty: Methodologies of Allocation to Groups and Their Characteristics

In this paper the poverty in Russia is examined by means of subjective approach. The author highlights three groups of poors using absolute, monetary and non-monetary subjective criteria. In this work the scales and characteristics of three groups are compared and the factors of falling into subjective poverty are featured. The analysis were carried out on the basis of the Levada-Center "Monitoring of socio-economic changes" 2012-10. The Leiden approach (LPL-Leyden Poverty Line) is applied by the researcher to identify the poor group based on the monetary criteria. The author makes an attempt to adopt western monetary methodology of allocation the subjectively poor, which according to the study results allows to obtain a monetary poverty line which is extremely close to the subsistence minimum. A portrait of the monetary subjectively poor, thus, makes it possible to get a familiar portrait of Russian poverty, with such typical features as: female prevalence, offset in the rural area, dependent load and unemployed during their working age, small share of retired (due to the fact that their pension were increased to the to the subsistence minimum), in case of employed representatives with employment in positions that do not require high qualification / education. In the process of analysis it was revealed that in the population view the “subjective poverty line” can act as a living wage metric (in the sense in which it is accepted in the scientific field), while the “subjective subsistence minimum” more likely to represent the low income line, but not the poverty line. Non-monetary subjective poverty is the destiny of the elderly and retired people and also partly of people of working age who have problems with employment. There are people with different levels of income in this group. The main conclusion is that monetary subjective approach might be used as an alternative for comparison with the absolute approach and non-monetary subjective approach then might be used as an indicator of those groups which are in need.