The Spatial Distribution of the Total Monetary Income of the Russian Population: Tendencies and Factors of Dynamics (1995–2003)

The main purpose of the paper is to investigate the tendencies of income distribution inequalities across the regions of The Russian Federation from 1995 to 2003. Two aspects of the problem have been taken into consideration. The first one is to compare the evolution of income structure: shares of the total income obtained from five different sources: (1) wages (salaries); (2) business (enterprise) activities; (3) social transfers; (4) property revenues; (5) other sources. Then the attention is focused on the “spatial differentiation”. For that the total income distributions across the regions as well as those of the five components have been determined. The GINI and FUND coefficients have been calculated to devise the spatial inequality. The evidence from the analyzed data indicates that there is a tendency to rising inequality between regional income distributions during the time, especially with regard to incomes from the “property”.