Slutsky compensating variation for assessing inflationary pressure on the income of the Ukraine population

Abstract

The article is devoted to the improvement of analytical tools, applying for household well-being assessment through using Slutsky compensating variation concept for the consideration of changes in the structure of consumer expenditures, as a factor, impacting the power of inflationary pressure. Authors propose to use the formula for calculating the compensating variation of income on the basis index of consumer price for every commodity group with a specific weight relevant to the share of spending on the appropriate commodity in the consumer budget. Calculations according to the proposed methodology made it possible to reveal significant differences in the distribution of inflationary pressure between Ukrainian households with different equivalent per capita incomes. The trend of shifting the burden of inflation to the least wealthy sections of the population looks extremely threatening. Having a highly concentrated demand (the majority of their budget is spent on essential goods, the prices of which are rising the fastest), such households face extremely unfavorable conditions for the development and even simple reproduction of human potential, and the effectiveness of social protection programs is clearly insufficient to counteract the decline in well-being and risks of marginalization of these population groups.