As a general question, do these income comparisons somehow factor in nonmonetary "income," state-supplied benefits or similar perks? E.g., in the country in which my butt is parked, monetary incomes are generally relatively low, but most families own their own apartments and grow their own food in part, plus electricity and utilities are dirt cheap, even giving the recent price increase. Thanks.
I hope I am not presenting myself as expert on this (anyone out there who is?) but here is my understanding.
State supplied utility benefits such as electricity are in Russia's national accounts in Ruble terms, so yes they are included in these comparisons. BUT there is no "objective" way to compare electricity in Russia vs. the U.S. (i.e. how do you convert the Rubles to dollars). Straight exchange rates are flawed (prices may be lower in Russia); so they have tried to create a different PPP conversion BUT, as I have tried to point out, inevitably this has new flaws and biases that are as serious.
Self-grown food is normally not in *conventional* national accounts - one example of why people get perplexed when they see very low GNP p/c figures that don't match up to their intuitive feel for living standards. As the obsession with GNP has grown, analysts have tried to extend it to measure "life as a whole" by "imputing" their own estimates of all sorts of things, including such non-market production, along with household production (esp. women's work and child labour), depreciation of the environment, etc. Some of this may have bled into including a bit of self-grown food in some countries' national accounts. ((And of course in Russia all bets are off when it comes to the official accounts which periodically include estimates of unrecorded income in ways that are negotiated within the govt and with foreign authorities.))
Existing apartments are assets so they are not, per se, in Russia's Ruble national accounts. But the depreciation (or creation of new assets) would be - in theory - put in the Ruble national accounts (no doubt big errors and guesses here). But depreciation would appear only under the heading of a Net National Product not the Gross National Product (aka Gross National Income). I don't even want to think about how they would include depreciation of an asset in a PPP version of a Net National Account (I haven't checked but I bet they don't bother to try to produce this).
Of course Russia is maintaining much of its living standard by living off its assets (and human skills) and this is another way that Gross National Accounts don't capture living standards.
Paul
