Nationwide poverty - “a threat to steady development and our demographic future”

In our paper “Trends in Public Opinion Regarding the Effectiveness of Public Administration. Presidential Cycles 2000-2021” published in the previous issue of the journal (December 2021), we identified several critical internal and external challenges that accompany the process of establishing a new Russian statehood and strengthening Russia’s geopolitical role in the context of the global historical process - the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world order. We identified the problem of poverty as one of the main “sore spots”, citing expert opinions and official statistical data revealing its scale and the complex nature of its implications. In the present article, we continue this topic and analyze in detail the problem of poverty - its geopolitical significance, objective and subjective components, how the dynamics of the standard of living and quality of life are perceived in various socio-demographic groups, as well as the key reasons that, in our opinion, explain why poverty has been an acute problem for Russia for more than a decade.