Wow, Rosstat! The average salary is more than 45 thousand

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

According to Rosstat, now the average accrued salary in the Russian Federation has exceeded 45 thousand rubles. How reliable is this? My technique was simple but tedious:

All workers who receive "white" wages pay a 13 percent personal income tax (PIT) from it. More precisely, employers pay it for them. These funds usually go in a proportion of 80 to 20 percent to the budgets of the subjects of the federation (territories, regions, republics, khanates, and so on) and the treasury of municipalities, respectively. We used the data of the territorial tax departments of the Federal Tax Service on personal income tax collections in 2011 for more than three dozen regions of the Russian Federation.

Then the total net (after tax) wages were calculated, which was divided by the number of employed people (working-age population minus unemployment according to the International Labor Organization standards) from the category of the economically active population (15-72 years). Thus, we got the lower bar, the lower mark of the artillery fork. The upper one was obtained by dividing the total volume of net wages in the region by the number of employed from the total number of the economically active population (already in the able-bodied population).

That is, we received for each region a certain corridor of probable white accrued salaries (not income!) With a scatter. Naturally, the technique, I repeat, is not ideal, but it is indicative:

Since 94% of the employed working-age population of Russia are hired workers, we considered that our method, with some errors of 5-10%, has a right to exist (naturally, we took into account that personal income tax also includes fees on winnings, dividends, and so on, but this can be neglected).

We examined a little more than 30 regions, and they turned out to be split into several groups at once. Pay attention to how different the corridors of average salaries are! Recall, these are all data for 2011:

1. Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District: 48,000 - 60,675 rubles
2. Moscow: 40 495 - 54 794 rubles
3. KhMAO (Ugra): 36 799 - 46 767 rubles
4. Sakhalin Region: 32 109 - 41 513 rubles
5. Kamchatka Territory: 26 360 - 33 578 rubles
6. Yakutia: 23 333 - 30 996 rubles
7. St. Petersburg: 20 931 - 28 101 rubles.

The gap between Moscow and St. Petersburg is exactly two times! It is difficult to imagine that, for example, in Berlin the average salary was, say, 4,000 euros, and in Dresden - 2,000 euros. And after all, St. Petersburg is not a wilderness, it is the second largest city in the country, the former capital, the only city in the Russian Federation built according to European patterns! And it is 2 times behind Moscow right off the bat, and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug - almost 2, 5 times! That is, even in the group of leaders there is such a serious gap …

And then consumers are surprised: how is it that, on average, salaries in the Russian Federation are low, but a stream of guest workers from even poorer former Soviet republics is rushing into it? And everything is simple: the "tolerant and hardworking" go not to the Ivanovo region or the Far East, but to Moscow, the Moscow region, the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, and so on.

Let's go further - the second group ("prosperous regions" and regional centers):

1. Krasnoyarsk Territory: 17,290 - 23,760 rubles
2. Moscow region: 15 448 - 21 180 rubles
3. Irkutsk Region: 13 593 - 18 244 rubles
4. Krasnodar Territory: 12,571 - 18,613

12-13. Kaliningrad region: 12,213 - 15,781 rubles

12-13. Yaroslavl region: 12 108 - 16 437 rubles

14-15. Chelyabinsk region: 11 767 - 15 736

14-15. Tatarstan: 11,575-16,000

Tver region: 11,000 - 15,000 rubles

And here, in general, beauty: the Tver region, located next to Moscow and the Moscow region, has a salary five (!) Times lower than the capital and the zamkadysh working in it. I don't know how to illustrate this. Let's say in Berlin the average salary is 2,000 euros, and in the federal state of Brandenburg - 400 euros. If the Germans are told about such imbalances, their hair will stand on end. In the less developed countries of Eastern Europe, the difference between wages in capitals and provinces is more pronounced, but even there it does not reach a ratio of 1: 5-6 (for example, in Bratislava, wages are on average 30-40% higher than in any Eastern Slovakia). But in the Russian Federation this is normal and it lasts for years! This is really terrifying.

The third group of regions is rogue. Average salaries in 2011 varied here from 7-9 to 12-14 thousand rubles:

Oryol region: 8,400 - 12,000 rubles

Smolensk region: 10,000 - 13,000 rubles

Novgorod region: 8,900 - 11,500 rubles

Tambov region: 7200 - 10,500 rubles

Arkhangelsk region: 9400 - 12 800 rubles

Mordovia: 7,500 - 10,200 rubles

Sverdlovsk Region: 9,500 - 12,300 rubles

Rostov Region: 9,000 - 12,800 rubles

Chechnya: 4600 - 6700 rubles

Primorsky Territory: 6200 - 8200 rubles

Bashkiria: 10,000 - 14,000 rubles.

To understand correctly: this is not the average income, but the average accrued salary! Therefore, before you write in the comments about your fellow drug dealers, who officially receive 10 thousand rubles and ride Mercedes, try to understand this point. Plus this is data from 2011. But it still turns out indicative.

In principle, such a study can be carried out now, but it takes time. From such a disparity in wages, a fairly clear and understandable picture is obtained of what the financial and economic authorities of the Russian Federation are doing.

First, in Moscow, with all its might, an “oasis of well-being” is being created and maintained. Every year it becomes more difficult, because even now the average salaries of Muscovites are at the level of the countries of Eastern Europe, or even lower. That is, residents of Warsaw, Brno, Prague, Bratislava and Budapest receive even more on average than Muscovites! But 10 years ago everything was the other way around! So far, it is clear that this megalopolis with a population of about 15-18 million people and an agglomeration around it with a population of 7-9 million people will be held by the Russian Federation to the “last”. Now there are already concentrated from 22 to 29 million people. In 2011, estimates of the population of the metropolitan area varied among full-time conspiracy theorists in the region of 20 million.

The Moscow metropolitan area has naturally developed its own "pseudo-economy" of a giant demographic pump. For example, this is a huge and bloated construction complex, which in recent years has clearly entered the stage of crisis: almost half of new buildings in Moscow and two-thirds of new buildings in the Moscow region are not sold out in the first year. Every month this is an aggravating problem of municipal solid waste landfills: all the old landfills are already overflowing, they did not bother to lay new ones for population growth. How long the Russian Federation will be able to "pull" on itself this "Babylon" is difficult to say. If earlier everything fit into a simple formula for the price of oil and other resources, now international sanctions, the race on the carriages of militarism with themselves, and external wars, and the structural split-up of the economy play a role …

Secondly, there is a certain group of regions in which “it is still possible to live”. These are Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, St. Petersburg, Sochi and Krasnodar Territory, something is stirring in Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Rostov-on-Don, but all this is already petty. Average salaries here are 2−2, 5 times lower than in Moscow. Finally, the third group is everything else. Of course, there are regional advantages there too, but in general they are more interesting for economic geographers (economic geography is one of the most hated and poorly understood scientific disciplines in the Russian Federation).

Thirdly, such monstrous imbalances mean that the Kremlin managers are not firmly going to develop the domestic consumer economy and raise the standard of living outside the Moscow agglomeration and 2-3 large urban centers. Or they can't. This means that the population from there will flow to large urban centers, as well as to the Moscow agglomeration. Most likely, in the 20s of this century, "Eurasia can come to Moscow" with all that it implies: low wages, unemployment and weak demand. After all, while Moscow is still “bathed in money,” but this money has become significantly less: in 2013, the budget of the Russian capital was at the level of New York ($ 65-70 billion), and now it is only $ 35 billion. Such a "Ukrainian spiral" is still carefully masked by powerful Sobyanin PR about the construction of transport infrastructure, the city center licked almost to the level of Krakow (an achievement!), Stories about "large-scale renovation" and the Zaryadye park with German trees.