Page 21 - RusRPTApr24

There were seven “green” indicators, 12 and 11 “red” and “yellow” indicators, respectively.
What to believe and what not to believe
“Red” means that the data is either manipulated, does not reflect reality well, or is completely closed. These are the cost of living, the poverty level, migration growth, the volume of foreign trade, population census results, the crime rate, causes of death, reforestation, income and property of civil servants, the number of prisoners, Russia's losses in the war with Ukraine and the number of mobilized.
Data on those killed in the war (the count is carried out by independent media), the number of prisoners, mobilized, foreign trade and the income of civil servants are completely “closed”. For the cost of living, poverty level, census and causes of death, the methodology has changed dramatically, becoming beneficial to the authorities. In the case of crime indicators, the “stick system” forces law enforcement officials to distort the data.
The “yellow” indicators include population income, unemployment rate, GDP, GRP, consumer price index, population size, number of interrupted pregnancies, number of people with HIV, volume of pollutant emissions, solid municipal waste.
In the case of GDP, the data may not reflect the standard of living of the population or the “health” of the economy due to its structure (we talked about the effect of the militarization of the Russian economy here). Low unemployment due to labor shortages reflects the imbalance of the economy rather than its strength. And the number of people living with HIV varies greatly depending on the data source (Ministry of Health or Rospotrebnadzor).
In the “greens”, fertility, infant mortality, the number of sentences, court cases, the number of cancer patients and RLMS data (Russian Monitoring of the Economic Situation and Health of the Population by the National Research University Higher School of Economics - a large and internationally recognized long-term household survey). These data can be trusted, they are not subject to external pressure and involve simple calculations, the authors explain.
The main goal of the study is to “test” the methodology and openly talk about the problems of Russian statistics, without falling into extreme forms of skepticism and denial of the quality of data simply by the fact of their origin, Cedar founder Arnold Khachaturov explained to The Bell.
What's in it for me?
Even in half-hidden and incomplete statistics you can find grains of truth. “The inertia of the “technocratic” part of the Russian state apparatus is quite strong: despite the war and the negative trends that we write about, many data are still available, there are no attempts to suddenly curtail the entire infrastructure for publishing statistics and open data,” notes Khachaturov.
21 RUSSIA Country Report April 2024 www.intellinews.com