"Oleg Smirnov" wrote in message news:scn7g6$n48$1...@os.motzarella.org...
>
> America has become today like a leprosarium.
>
> And this is statistics, not separate/staged stories.
And we don't HAVE to manipulate our stats...
------------------------------------------------------------------
Inconvenient numbers: How Rosstat manipulates data to accommodate
federal and regional officials
July 8, 2021
Source: Proekt
The Russian authorities are “fighting statistics instead of problems,” says
the investigative outlet Proekt in a new report. Under pressure from the
Kremlin, the government, and regional leaders, the Federal Statistics
Service (Rosstat) has bent over backward to correct “bad” numbers and bury
unflattering statistics. According to Proekt’s sources, the Kremlin and the
Cabinet also made a conscious decision to publish official data not only as
rarely as possible, but also at the most inconvenient times. Meduza
summarizes the story here.
In April 2019, Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) found
itself at the center of a scandal after it released a study about the
country’s standard living. The data revealed that 53 percent of Russian
families can’t cover unexpected repairs or medical expenses, 35 percent can’t
buy seasonal footwear for every family member, and 21 percent can’t afford
to eat fruit all year round. Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said
that the Russian leadership found it “difficult to understand this data.”
Forced to offer an explanation, Rosstate said that this study, which raised
questions in the Kremlin, was one of the most representative and in-depth in
Russia.
That June, Boris Johnson, who was running for prime minister of the UK at
the time, used Rosstat’s statistics to criticize Putin. Responding to the
Russian president’s claim that “the liberal idea” had “outlived its
purpose,” Johnson argued that there’s a direct link between liberal values
and economic well-being. “I don’t want to put too fine a point on it,
Vladimir, but there are some countries where […] according to the Russian
statistics agency Rosstat, a third of the country cannot afford to buy more
than two pairs of shoes per year; where 12% of the population still has to
rely on an outdoor toilet, and where real incomes have declined for each of
the past five years,” Johnson wrote, twisting Rosstat’s data slightly.
Bad numbers
The Russian Cabinet and Presidential Administration “shuddered” at the news
from Rosstat — they saw it as a “threat to social stability,” a former
government official told Proekt. That said, members of the government couldn’t
just ban the publication of “bad” numbers: this would require amendments to
the federal law on official statistics. As such, they decided to “minimize
the consequences” of the data, the same informed source told Proekt.
Recently, Rosstat has begun to publish its statistical reports at
inconvenient times. For example, in May 2020, the agency released statistics
on the decline in industrial production against the backdrop of the
coronavirus pandemic at 9:00 p.m. instead of at 4:00 p.m., the usual
publication time. And in April 2021, Rosstat postponed the publication of
data on the change in real incomes in Russia until nine days after Putin’s
state of the nation address (as it turns out, real incomes fell by 3.6
percent).
According to Proekt’s sources, the Kremlin and the Cabinet decided it was
best to publish official statistics as rarely and as late as possible: all
urgent information (for example, data on inflation, unemployment, industrial
production, and foreign trade) would be issued once a week, usually at 7:00
p.m. on Wednesdays, and the most sensitive statistics (for example, on
mortality from the coronavirus) would be published on Friday evenings.
Rosstat didn’t like the idea, but it had a soft spot for two key media
policy curators — the Presidential Administration’s First Deputy Chief of
Staff Alexey Gromov and the Apparatus of the Government’s Deputy Chief of
Staff Leonid Levin, a source close to the Rosstat leadership told Proekt.
Pressure from the regions
Officials in the federal government aren’t the only ones who put pressure on
Rosstat. “Once we got a call from a local Health Ministry with the question:
‘How can we reduce the death rate?’ Is this a normal question? No, the
Health Ministry should do something to actually reduce it, but apparently,
the statistics agency [should do it] on paper,” a regional statistics office
employee from the Russian Far East told Proekt.
Alexey Rakhsa, a former advisor to Rosstat’s demographics department who
left the agency following a conflict with the leadership, told Proekt that
in 2019, the authorities in Moscow, the Moscow Region, and Tatarstan asked
Rosstat to lower their forecasts for local life expectancy and overestimate
the expected mortality rates in order to meet Putin’s demographic target.
According to Raksha, Rosstat met the regional authorities half way (the
agency’s leadership was allegedly threatened with dismissal if they refused)
and as a result, it was impossible to square the population projection. An
unnamed federal official confirmed to Proekt that “in principle, there isn’t
a real demographic forecast now.”
Demographic data may also have been falsified in Sevastopol, the largest
city on the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
According to Rosstat, every Russian region saw a decrease in life expectancy
in 2020, whereas life expectancy in Sevastopol allegedly increased
(preliminary statistics said it should have dropped by 0.6 years, but
instead it went up by 0.05 years). Alexey Raksha believes this can be
attributed to the fact that on paper, the Russian authorities in Sevastopol
increased the city’s population by 60,000 people last year. According to
demographers, Russian regions can benefit from overestimating the data on
population size, because it allows them to obtain more subsidies from the
state budget.
Hiding the details
This manipulation of statistics also affected the data on the mortality rate
during the pandemic, a source close to the Cabinet and a federal official
who asked to remain anonymous told Proekt. According to Rosstat, the
mortality rate increased by 340,300 people in 2020, but only 42.5 percent of
these deaths were caused by COVID-19 (that’s approximately 144,700
deceased). The remainder died of pneumonia (a 2.4-fold increase), diabetes
(up 26 percent), nervous system diseases (up 21 percent), and “of old age”
(up 20 percent). Proekt’s source close to the Cabinet believes that
coronavirus fatalities may also have been included in these categories.
In 2021, Rosstat generally stopped publishing monthly statistics on which
diseases Russians were dying from, aside from COVID-19. Full mortality
statistics will most likely be published only in the summer of 2022, a
source close to the Rosstat leadership told Proekt.
In addition to hiding demographic data, Rosstat is also burying income
statistics. Back in 2019, the agency published statistics on the salaries of
federal employees, broken down by ministry and department. These reports
revealed that officials working in the Presidential Administration and the
Apparatus of the Government, for example, earn a lot more than people
working for other branches of the federal government (by today’s exchange
rate, the former earned upwards of $3,000 per month on average in 2018; by
comparison Defense Ministry staff made about $1,400 a month). But in 2020,
after the arrival of the new Cabinet under Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin,
Rosstat stopped publishing these breakdowns.
In addition, in 2019, Rosstat changed its methodology for calculating the
population’s real disposable incomes (household income after taxes and
benefits, adjusted for inflation) — after which real disposable incomes grew
by 0.1 percent (earlier, the agency reported incomes decreasing by 0.1
percent). That same year, Rosstat reported record GDP growth for the first
time in six years, after recalculating the data on construction in the
Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.
Proekt links these manipulations to the fact that in 2017, Rosstat became a
child agency of the Economic Development Ministry and in 2018, Pavel
Malkov — who previously ran the development ministry’s Public Administration
Department — took over as the agency’s head. Prior to 2017, Rosstat was
directly subordinate to the Cabinet.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2021/07/08/inconvenient-numbers