Wages in Russia in 2015-2021

Abstract

The article presents analysis of the wage dynamics in the Russian Federation in 2015-2020 and the first half of 2021. In 2018 Russia changed the methodology for calculating separate items in the Balance sheet of the population monetary income and expenses. This concerned, among other things, the item of payment for work, from which hidden (officially unaccounted for) wages and other cash receipts were excluded, and payroll fund of employees in organizations was singled out. Besides, Rosstat developed methods for estimating average wages of all employees (working in organizations, for individual entrepreneurs, farmers and individuals) and published the results for 2015-2021. The article also presents author's estimation of the average wages of employees working for individual entrepreneurs, farmers, and individuals in 2018-2020. In 2020 average wages of these categories of workers made 72.9% of the average wages of all employees and 60.2% of the employed in organizations. Due to lack of official data on the wage differentiation of all employees, the article provides variants of its estimation for 2017-2019 using primary data from SSPI. Low wages of those working for individual entrepreneurs, farmers and individuals serve as a factor of higher earnings inequality of all categories of employees. In 2019 R/P 10% ratio made by different calculation algorithms 18.5 and 15.7 times against 13 times for those employed in organizations. There are provided results on the impact of the minimum wage on the level and differentiation of wages.