COVID-19 and Anti-Crisis Social Support

The authors analyze the response of the Russian government to the shrinking of household incomes during the 2020 economic crisis — the social support measures that were put in place to check the increase in poverty, and the social groups that were targeted by direct federal cash benefits. The anticrisis social support measures in Russia were, on the whole, comparable in composition and scope to what the governments in other countries were doing. A special feature of the Russian approach was that the new social benefits and the increased amounts of already existing benefits were addressed exclusively to families with children and were granted irrespective of household income levels. The authors estimate that the additional social support benefits, had they been implemented before the crisis, would have reduced the pre-crisis level of poverty by almost one third, although seven out of ten Russian households were left out of this additional support because they had no underage children. This leads to the conclusion that, in the future, social support policies must change to meet new challenges not only quickly, as they did during the last year’s crisis, but also in a more targeted manner.