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The OECD poverty rate: Lessons from the Russian case

Poverty is a multidimensional problem, and the very notion of what constitutes ‘poverty’ varies greatly across and within societies. In principle, poverty can be measured in terms of absolute, relative and subjective dimensions. Which method is chosen to determine poverty, however, depends, among other things, on the availability and comparability of data, the level of development of a society and, last but not least, one’s own idea of a just society. It is itself a normative act of social policy. In measuring poverty, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) focuses on relative income indicators, as this approach is said to take into account the different levels of well-being in a society and allow for comparing income situations across countries. Information on relative income, Förster and d’Ercole (2009) argue, allows us to draw conclusions about people’s living conditions. The key OECD indicator for international comparison of poverty is the poverty rate, which is defined as the percentage of people living in households whose income falls below half the median household income of the total population (OECD, 2020). According to this statistic, the poverty rate in 2016 was 10.4% in Germany, 12.7% in Russia and 17.8% in the United States. From the perspective of qualitative research on poverty in Russia, this figure is astonishing. In fact, the value for Russia is very close to what the Russian Federal State Statistics Service Rosstat itself indicates as the national poverty rate for 2016 (13.2%), even if they use an absolute poverty line. Meanwhile, these OECD data series suggest that the problem of poverty in Russia is only marginally more prevalent than in Germany and significantly lower than in the United States. Although I cannot make a qualitative comparison at this point, this seems misleading in view of the Russian situation. This raises the question of what epistemological value can be derived from the cross-country OECD comparison of poverty rates (as well as from other international poverty benchmarks) in very different societies. As this is a short forum article, I cannot give a conclusive answer to this question here. Rather, my aim is to illustrate the complexity behind poverty figures using Russia as an