I am hoping those are dachas and not regular houses.
Posted on 11/05/2004 2:22:58 PM PST by jb6
MOSCOW - According to the Federal Statistics Service of the Russian Federation, the gap between the rich and the poor has been widening in Russia over the past 6 months, the Novye Izvestia newspaper reported. This could lead to a rise in social tension, which concerns businessmen.
In the estimation of the Financial Ministry, cash incomes of the upper 10 percent of Russia’s rich men are almost 15.2 times higher than incomes of the bottom 10 percent of the country’s poor. This is above the threshold level beyond which social discontent grows (15 percent). It is alarming that social inequality grows every year. In 2001, the rich were 10 times as rich as the poor; in 2002, they were 13 times richer, and 2003 – 14 times. According to the Federal Statistics Service, the upper 10 percent of Russia’s rich account for 29.8 percent of the country’s total personal incomes, while the bottom 10 percent of the poor account for 2 percent.
According to the Federal Statistics Service, the percentage of incomes earned by the rich in Russia’s total personal incomes increased 0.2 percent, and the percentage of incomes earned by the poor dropped 0.1 percent. 13.6 percent of Russians live below the subsistence level.
UN experts offered their recommendations on how developing countries should fight against poverty. In their opinion, the development of the private sector in Russia will reduce poverty through job creation and wage increases. In view of this, the government should facilitate entry into the market, especially for small businesses, eradicate corruption and boost confidence of businesses in the government, the newspaper says.
But Russian analysts disagree. In their opinion, businesses are doing their best to eradicate poverty. The situation in Russia, they say, is different from the situation in other developing countries. There are four major groups of the poor in Russia: pensioners, public sector employees, rural residents and students – in other words, those who are financed from the budget. As for other developing countries, such people are not the poorest there.
According to the World Bank, 19.6 percent of Russia’s population is poor. The UN ranked Russia 57th in terms of living standards. Meanwhile, the Russian government expects real disposable personal incomes to increase 35-40 percent by 2007.
The Cabinet set itself the task of reducing the number of people living below the subsistence level by half over the next 3-4 years – from 30m people to 10-15m people. Government officials say Russia’s poverty rate dropped to 20.8 percent in the first half of 2004. In January-June 2003, the level of poverty was 23.5 percent. The number of those living below subsistence level, dropped from 33.7m people to 29.8m people.
Moscow is really beautiful, but if you drive just a few miles out... You'll see dirt roads, beat up little houses, old ladies/children selling flowers by the road...
Damn, I didn't know Putin was a republican. I'll bet homelessness has risen too. Hunger now has a real presence too I'm sure.
Sorry, couldn't help it.
Yup......Rich-poor gap widening in Russia
......Yup.....The rich are moving to the U.S.A......that's a gap!
I personally would say that now there are more rich people than poor people than there were in Russia in 1986.
Also I would say that there are more people in Russia today.
Reality is: some people will always be poor: pensioners, well it's a pitty but most have their families to help them. Students, those are university students, they have careers ahead of them. Alcoholics and bums: well life's a bitch.
Yup, that's something they are not harping about: the size of the growing and growing in wealth, middle class. Even the neutral newspapers get a bit left. It's like a virus.
Gee I guess they need to bring back Stalin.
And we must never waver in trying to find the cure.
I am hoping those are dachas and not regular houses.
Hehehe, that's not bad looking, come on down to NC, I'll take you around the Fayetville/Ft. Bragg area, the run down trailer parks with next door instant garbage dumps are coozy. Then we can cover the space between Fayetville south to Atlanta, one little crappola at a time. Of course there is alway Appalachia, now that's a whole nother set of issues.
Rich poor gap is part of capitalism. Means they aren't stealing money from those with ambition to give to those who sit on their butts.
Obviously time to raise communism from the dead, in the Gulag all pigs were equal.
"Moscow is really beautiful,..."
I guess you've never hung out around the Slavanskya Train Station. It's not very beautiful down there. And the Moscow river is digusting.
But to be fair, there are some pretty areas of Moscow and I have a thing for Russian women.
Don't recall slavyanskaya... I wasn't too impressed by the market at Izmailovo.. But most of the city is very pretty.. Lot's of trees, unlike NYC.
Village life rulez ;-)
You child molester! :P
It must have been so much better when there was no gap and everyone was just poor. 4 families to an apartment and breadlines, god, how they must log for those days.
I was just waiting for my ride!
Sorry, but you're wrong on your second point. Russia is undergoing severe population collapse. It's population could be halved within fifty years. Disease (including a massive AIDS infection rate), alcoholism and abortion are killing them off much quicker than replacement rate--average age at death for a Russian male is somewhere in the fifties. Russia is a demographic disaster in the making.
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