Thanks for the input! See below. > > State supplied utility benefits such as electricity > are in Russia's > national accounts in Ruble terms, so yes they are > included in these > comparisons.
Even with the recent price hikes, my monthly electricity bill in Moscow (pretty large Stalin-era apartment, with two big rooms, kitchen, bathroom, water closet) is a whopping $8. Domestic consumers also get gas and oil at far below market rates (you probably already know this). BTW even if an apartment dweller simply refuses to pay the bill, there is no effective way to disconnect him or her, since Soviet apartment blocks are constructed in such a way that you either shut power off to the whole block or not at all. Ditto for water. Such deadbeats were frequent subjects of mockery in Soviet comedies. > > 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. That's a very good point. I remember how stunned I was at how much richer Moscow was than I has expected, going by official figures (unaware that up to half of the economy does not exist on the books). (The home-grown food issue, BTW, also points to what a wild exaggeration Gaidar's warning of impending famine was in 1991. It is impossible to starve in Russia. I know people who got through the dark days of the early 90s by gathering mushrooms in the forest. Russia is mostly wilderness. Hunting is as much a way of life in Siberia, as, say tax evasion in Moscow. :) ) Moreover, Russia still has a strange, quasi-Soviet economy that is to some extent nonmonetarized. E.g. the factory where someone works might pay him or her practically nothing, but it provides daycare for your kids, gives you meals, free bus passes etc. etc. etc. (This is why people where able to survive during the days of year-long wage delays -- they didn't live off their wages. Their wages were supplemental.) > > Existing apartments are assets so they are not, per > se, in Russia's Ruble > national accounts. Incidentally the high apartment ownership rate and the way it was acquired (privatization of the apartment you happened to live in in 1991) has interesting sociological effects. For instance, Russia does not have ghettoes organized around ethnic or income (or for that matter sexual) lines. You can have a middle-class family and an impoverished beggar living next to one another (the exception is the rich). The concept of a slum is completely alien (I recollect an Indian acquaintance trying to get the idea across to a Russian coworker to no avail -- "you mean like a Khrushchev building?" "You don't understand, you've never seen a slum."). For the same reason Russian cities are not divided into low- and high-crime areas -- there is a low level of danger everywhere, but nowhere that is completely secure and nowhere that it is suicide to go into. There's also the everpresent alcoholic who seems to live in every apartment block, who would be on the streets in the United States but still has his apartment to stagger home to in Russia (everything in the apartment, however, has probably been pawned to buy booze). __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
