The Role Of The Middle Class In Russian Economic Transition

The middle class has grown in in late 2011. A massive protest movement makes middle class officially boarded the stage of Russian history, and causes a large number of academic, social and political debates. What their main concern is that under the condition of modernization reformation, as the safeguard of Russia’s stable and sustainable development and the carrier of innovation potential, what role the middle class will play?In fact, the impact of the global financial crisis in 2008 has exposed the fragility of Russian economic development fully. Under this background, the economic modernization is also on the agenda again, while the middle class is considered to be irreplaceable in power. So, the middle class could undertake this task? Begin from this problem, this paper attempts to examine in the role of middle class in the whole transition process, in particular, if the middle class can promote economic growth? If so, in which way and by which means? Could the middle class can promote economic structural adjustment? How the relationship with the whole economic system reform process? This article is based on thinking about these problems, according to the Russian market economy reform process, combing the development situation of Russian middle class at the same time, using Russian longitudinal monitoring survey database to measure of Russian middle class, and investigating its role in the economic transition, in the end, trying to explore for the influence of middle class’ development on Russia’s future politics and economics. Specifically, the full text is divided into seven chapters.The first chapter is introduction. Mainly introduced the significance and background of the reason why selected this topic, at the same time, combing the current literature on the power of the middle class and the related research about Russian middle class problems, mainly analyzes the related research of economics on the middle class. And pointed out the paper, also point out the research method, potential innovation and the chapters arrangement of this paper.The second chapter is the theory frame of the role of middle class. Firstly, clear the concept of middle class in this paper, and according to the historical process of marketization reform of Russian, observe the middle class from the perspective of market-oriented type and non-market observation, combined with the existing theory and reality of Russia, expound the on the role of middle class in the economic transformation, for the arrangement of the later chapters content laid the theoretical framework.The third chapter is about the development condition of Russian middle class. This chapter according to the Russian market economy reform process, in combination with various periods’ reform policies, from the perspective of market-oriented type and non-market generalizes the evolution on the development of Russian middle class. Concretely, this process can be divided into three stages:the Soviet Union: the differentiation of social structure and middle-class bud; Yeltsin reform period: from non-market type to the market-oriented transformation; The putin period: the scale of the middle class growing continually.then,we use econometric methods to analysis the factors affecting the development of the Russian middle class, the results show that there is a significant positive relationship between the level of economic development and the middle class, which means the economic growth of the middle class can contribute to the expansion of the scale, government spending can also contribute to the development of the middle class, but mainly achieved through social support. In addition, trade openness, human capital and the proportion of non-state economy has a positive impact on the middle class, but, due to special transitional circumstances, the proportion of non-state economic impact on the performance of the Russian middle class is not obvious. The study also show that inflation is not conducive to the development of the middle class, but the impact is small.The fourth chapter analyzes the impact of market transformation of the middle class. The one of the core tasks of Russian economic transition is to change the economic system to a market system from the traditional planning system. This chapter first reviews the performance and the role of the middle class in the economic system reform, and proposes two hypothesis proposition: First,there is a positive correlation between the market and the middle class; second, market-oriented middle class market driven than the non-market-based middle class.then we verify that these two propositions and think the conclusion is established.The fifth chapter analyzes the impact on economic growth of the middle class. Despite major economic transformation is the transformation of the economic system, after the regime change, the transformation of the task has a new meaning:how to maintain sustained economic growth and sound economic structure.so, in the next two chapters, we mainly analyze the impact on economic growth of the middle class and the economic structure. In view of the middle class discourse on economic growth in theory, the author tries to adopt econometrics method to test the relationship between Russian middle class and economic growth during the transitional period empirically, first of all, the author have a measure about middle class based on Russia’s household survey data on the middle class, and further, subdivided middle class into market-oriented and non-market type, and then build a model to investigate the relationship between the middle class, the internal different groups of middle class and the economic growth, but also on the middle class function of economic growth way is analyzed.After inspection of the middle class and the overall economic relations, we analyzes the impact of the economic structure of the middle class. The analysis includes two sections:the demand structure and industrial structure. There is a significant feature of middle-class consumption:Russian middle class spending on education accounted is high, indicating that they place more emphasis on education. However, the proportion of spending on luxury goods is far greater than durables, indicating that the Russian middle class is obvious to show off wealth.Then,we use econometric model to analyzes the impact of the consumption structure of the middle class. The results showed that there is a significant negative correlation between the size of the middle class and the spending of food and alcoholic,and there is a significant positive correlation between the size of the middle class and housing, transportation, communication and education. This may be related to the consumption structure and income elasticity of the middle class. Industrial structure, measurement results show that the impact on agriculture of the middle class as a significant negative correlation; On Industry also negative, but not significant, the impact on the service sector of the middle class as a significant positive correlation. The results also show that the consumer is a middle way to achieve this result (except agriculture). This indicates that the middle class can reduce agricultural, industrial share and expand services accounting.Chapter seven is conclusion and prospect...