Household Earnings in Putin’s Russia: Distributional Changes across Socioeconomic Groups, 2000–2016

Following Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine and the imposition of sanctions by countries worldwide, Russian population faces a crisis with deep but differentiated consequences across socioeconomic groups. We examine the evolution of earnings and societal earnings gaps throughout Vladimir Putin’s presidency, including the 2014 oil bust and trade war spurred by Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Unconditional quantile regressions are applied to 2000–2016 surveys to estimate the distributional changes across urban/rural, farming/non-farming and gender divides at all earnings quantiles, and growth incidence curves for the respective groups are derived using consistent survey waves around the crisis years of 2014–2015. Urban-rural gaps are found to be pervasive, particularly at lower earnings quantiles, while gender gaps declined over time. Rural and female-headed households receive lower returns on their endowments because they lack employment opportunities. The 2014 shocks affected all groups, particularly the rural poor, export-oriented farmers, and urban rich, not only immediately but over several years.