Kommersant: The Ministry of Labor plans a new approach to accounting for the number of poor in Russia 
On Friday, November 26, the Ministry of Labor will submit the tripartite commission is a draft government decree that introduces an additional tool for assessing poverty in the country. Kommersant writes about this with a link to the document.
As conceived, a new indicator that complements the subsistence minimum – the poverty line – will take into account the level of general inflation, and not a change in a narrow “minimum” set of consumption. As a definition of the poverty line, the department proposes to use the value of the subsistence minimum for the fourth quarter of 2020, and to revise it on a quarterly basis taking into account the chain consumer price index for the corresponding quarter.
when the country's measured poverty rate increases as the economy grows and the median income grows.
In Russia, a person is considered poor if his income is less than the subsistence level. In 2021, it is set at 11,653 rubles, in 2022 – at 11,950 rubles. Previously, the value of the subsistence minimum depended on the value of the consumer basket, mandatory payments and fees and was calculated on a quarterly basis. Starting this year, the value of the subsistence minimum is determined at 44.2 percent of the median per capita income for the last year and is revised at least once every five years. The median is the notional value of the income level. Half of the population has an income higher than this value, while the other – lower. The last time the poverty indicator was included in the macro forecast was in 2020 during the revision of the draft budget for 2020-2023, when the presidential decree on national development goals had not yet been signed.
On October 26, it was reported that the Ministry of Economic Development is planning return the poverty level assessment to the forecast of socio-economic development. Thus, Russia will soon start counting the poor again when forecasting the country's development. Then the head of the Accounts Chamber Alexei Kudrin said that poverty estimates should be included in the forecast of socio-economic development. Kudrin noted that “this population group should be better planned.”