Page 25 - RusRPTFeb19

badly as they all suffer from high levels of poverty (Estonia: 21.7, Latvia: 21.8, Lithuania: 21.9) that has given them all poor despair index numbers of 29.9- 32.7 and rank them in the middle of the table.
However, this poor showing is surely partly due to the differences in where the poverty line is set. In Central Asia the line is drawn at those that live on $1.90 a day or less. In Estonia in 2016 a person was considered to be living in relative poverty if his/her equalised monthly disposable income was below €468 euros. In 2016, the income of the poorest and the richest quintile of the population differed 5.8 times.
For comparison, Russia’s average income in 2018 was €532 and the poverty line was set at €134 equivalent. However that does not take purchase price parity (PPP) into account, which would increase the minimum needed to get by 2.3 times, or in ppp terms the Russian poverty line is about €310 – so not that far from the Estonian poverty line.
Factoring in all these adjustments and the despite index in the Baltics is still uncomfortably high but still acceptable at about 30.
Southeastern Europe and Central Asla
The bottom half of the list is made up largely of the countries from the Balkans, Caucasus and Central Asia – with a few outstanding exceptions. Amongst the top five countries with the lowest despair indices are Kazakhstan (ranked 2nd after Belarus), Azerbaijan (3) and Moldova (5).
Perhaps it is no surprise that raw materials producing countries do well in the despair stakes as their leaders are careful to spread enough of their oil wealth about to placate the populous. Poverty in both Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan (and Russia) is extremely low.
At the same time these southern countries are also exhibiting the “Belarus effect” where the government has failed to implement market reforms and kept many of the old Soviet institutions going that shores up support from their older base and keeps them in power. Given that poverty in Uzbekistan Tajikistan is 12.3 and 32 respectively, a countries oil wealth looks like it can shave some 10-20 points off the poverty rate. And also on this basis Uzbekistan looks like it was a well run dictatorship under the previous president Islam Karimov, who died last year, while Tajikistan looks to be extremely badly run the Tajik president Emomali Rahmon.
All the countries at the bottom of the list have despair scores on the order of 45-55 and poverty and unemployment are the blights they have to bare.
Iran ranks third to bottom, but this is largely due to extremely high inflation that soared following the re-imposition of sanctions, so it should be able to recover. Turkey is second to bottom and all three indicators are high following its currency crisis this year and will take a lot longer to recover. Kosovo is the only country to have a score over 60, which is a full blown crisis score and somewhere it has been for several years now.
2.7 Watcom catches up lost ground in November, but still below par
Russia’s Watcom shopping index caught up some lost ground in November, but remains at its lowest level in four years.
The index, which measures footfall in Moscow’s biggest malls using face recognition technology and the mall’s security cameras, gives a real time measure of the number of shoppers in the largest malls in the country.
The index recorded a value of 503 in week 50 of 2018, the second highest
25 RUSSIA Country Report February 2019 www.intellinews.com