More than 40 percent of Russian families struggle to find the money to buy food or clothes, a study by Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (HSE) revealed Wednesday.

Forty-one percent of Russians told researchers that they lacked money for food and clothes, while 23 percent described their material situation as “bad” or “very bad.”

The NSE study was designed to monitor levels of “subjective poverty,” or whether a person sees themselves as “poor” or “very poor.”

Researchers from the All Russia Public Opinion Research Center asked Russians to rate their material situation from very bad to very good, and evaluated their spending power on necessities such as food, shoes, and furniture.

The number of Russians who believed they lived in “ subjective poverty” rose to 19 percent in June, up from 16 percent in May.

Rostat figures for the first quarter of 2016 show that 16 percent of Russia’s population live below the poverty line.





