ABSTRACT
Poverty has become one of the most severe social problems in Russia today. At the beginning of the year 2000, approximately 30 million citizens onequarter of the Russian population, were living below the poverty level. Figure 16.1 illustrates the scale of this problem. There has been some discussion about how the role of the “shadow market” should be accounted for when estimating poverty rates in Russia; in truth, consideration of the “shadow economy” probably requires an adjustment of less than 1 percent because of the fact that those involved in this system are primarily not poor people.
