DARTS : INFORMATION

Information About Darts

DARTS uses information from a representative sample of the Russian population taken from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) for the year 2000. The survey covers just over 3000 households and records a great deal of information about each household and about its individual members: incomes from different sources, employment history, home production, spending on different types of goods, housing and so on. DARTS uses this information to calculate the likely effects of tax and benefit changes on each household, and then aggregates this information over all households to produce a picture of how the changes affect the Russian population as a whole. population as a whole.

The richness of the RLMS data allows a wide variety of interesting and informative output to be produced. DARTS automatically generates tables and graphs that break down the results of alternative tax and benefit scenarios by income decile (or, more precisely, deciles of living standards), age group, region and family type. For each of these subgroups, the results report the numbers of gainers and losers, average gains and losses in roubles, and changes in the numbers of individuals in poverty.

DARTS was developed at UNU-WIDER by André Decoster, Tony Shorrocks and Inna Verbina. This online version was produced by Graham Stark and Jocelyn Paine of the Virtual Worlds Group in collaboration with the original authors and Bruck Tadesse of UNU-WIDER.

Some Terms Used in Darts

Disposable Income.

Household Income after adding in benefits and subtracting income taxes.

Living standards per household.

The estimated consumption of goods by the household, taking into account any changes to their disposable income, and any changes in commodity prices due to changes to indirect taxes.

Per capita living standards.

Living standards per household, divided by the number of people in the household.

Poverty line.

The level of consumption deemed to be the minimum acceptable for each household, given the number of people in the household and their ages.

Poverty status.

This variable indicates whether household consumption is far below, slighly below, close to, or above the poverty line.

Household Type.

A household consists of a group of people living together, sharing housekeeping (preparing food together, for example). It can consist of more than one nuclear family, for example a group of friends living together, or a family that has their parents-in-law or grown up children living with them. This variable classifies the household according to the number of children, pensioners and other adults.

Economic Activity

This indicates the economic position of the principal earner in the household.

Income Decile.

Deciles rank households in tenths, from the poorest to the richest, measured on the basis of per capita living standards as described above.

Region.

These are the standard Russian regions used, for example, in the Russian census.

The tables and charts showing gainers and losers indicate the numbers of Russian households in thousands. These figures are calculated by "grossing up" the households in the RLMS data to represent the Russian population as a whole. Since there are just over 52 million households in Russia, and just over 3,200 households in the sample, each RLMS household is deemed on average to represent around 16,500 household in the Russian population, but the actual weights for each household type differs depending on whether we think there are too many of too few of that type of household in the population compared to the sample.