Economist Korenev: Russians' incomes have been falling since 2014, the economy is developing slowly 
Despite the fact that the Russian authorities regularly report economic growth , it is still developing more slowly than it should, and the real incomes of Russians have been falling steadily since 2014, said Alexei Korenev, an economist and analyst at FG Finam. In a conversation with Lenta.ru, he explained this by the fact that the country is significantly lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of labor productivity.
According to previously published data from a survey by the Center for Civil Society and Commercial Sector Research at the Higher School of Economics, 70 percent of Russians complain about financial difficulties. At the same time, 66 percent of citizens declared a difficult financial situation in 2020.
Falling incomes and a credit bubble
According to Korenev, there is nothing surprising in this: in Russian realities, the economy and the prosperity of the population are two different things.
“The incomes of Russians began to decline in 2014, as soon as the sanctions were introduced,” the economist recalled. – More precisely, there was a nominal growth for two years, but it was achieved due to the fact that Rosstat, retroactively, carried out a technical recalculation. So you can tell as much as you like that our economy is growing, but this is still happening more slowly than it should: we are far behind in terms of labor productivity, GDP growth, and incomes of the population and households. Here you need to believe not general reports about how good and fun life is, but real numbers. And they say that the cost of food, housing and communal services, non-food products are growing much faster than the salaries of Russians. ”
In many respects, Korenev explains the formal growth of the Russian economy by luck: this happened with a sharp jump in prices for gas, oil and metals. But at the same time, according to him, a huge number of enterprises went bankrupt, and small and medium-sized businesses faced a severe crisis.
“And, of course, the most important thing is labor productivity. We are catastrophically lagging behind the civilized world, as a result of which it turns out that Russians work a lot, and the exhaust from their work is small. We need efficient technologies, deep processing enterprises, then this brings the country more income, and, accordingly, wages will grow. Unfortunately, to implement such a task, political will is needed, but in our case it is absent, ”the economist said.
A constant drop in income threatens the prospect of a credit bubble collapsing. Korenev drew attention to the debt burden of the population, which is often forced to take new loans in order to close the previous ones.
“People took consumer loans without a decent wage. They took out mortgages under the concessional lending program, which are now unable to service. All of this could end in a credit bubble collapsing. True, the Central Bank swears that it is monitoring the situation and will not allow such an outcome. He has the physical capabilities for this, let's hope that the Central Bank knows what it is doing, “Korenev concluded.
In early November, the Ministry of Economic Development announced plans to revise the data on incomes, expenditures and savings of the population for 2018– 2020 to clarify sources of information.