All-Russian Survey of Consumer Finance

The responses to the household questionnaire provide insights in the following areas:

• the social and demographic characteristics of households
• housing conditions, including fully owned real estate properties, the financial sources used to purchase such properties, and their estimated value
• real estate loans
• plans/intentions to purchase housing/land
• household income and expenses, and their structure
• stability of income
• saved income, its structure, and financial planning horizon

The questionnaire for individual consumers allows insights into:

• the assessment of the economic situation and sentiment expectations as to future incomes, inflation, exchange rates, and interest rates
• employment
• the amount  and structure of financial assets
• preferences with regard to the desired structure of financial assets by type
• the payment instruments in use
• the volume and structure of financial liabilities including current and planned demand for loans
• preferences with regard to the amount of savings out of income (saving behaviour) or the amount of outstanding financial liabilities
• the value and structure of other non-financial assets (vehicles)
• financial literacy
• financial health
• financial inclusion

The survey creates value for research and the analysis of a wide range of current issues.

They include, first, the sources for the financing of consumer demand, which usually account for about 70% of GDP. This involves the analysis of consumer and saving behaviour, demand for loans, and the role of income, interest rates, financial inclusion, and financial literacy in financial decision making.

Second, they include the study of household finance imbalances and the assessment of financial stability risks by measuring the volume, structure, and trends of debt.

The third promising venue of research is to analyze how households adapt to economic shocks and crises and how they are affected by policy measures.

The fourth focal area is supply-side constraints and household preferences on the demand side, which is essential to strategies for financial inclusion and the development of the financial market.

The survey data are in two formats (.csv and .RData) and need to be cleansed of outliers and omissions.

The data are in the form of a common file with the survey results of all waves and with a separate view of the survey results of the 2022 and 2024 waves. The information for 2022 and 2024 in the merged data file is identical to that in the 2022 and 2024 file.

In the Household Questionnaire files, the variable id_w is consistent with the year of the survey wave. The variable id_h represents the household code in the corresponding survey wave. id_h may change depending on the wave of the survey. Household data from other waves are added using variables aid_h, bid_h, cid_h, did_h, eid_h, and fid_h. The first letter of the variable name corresponds with the wave: a – 2013, b – 2015, c – 2018, d – 2020, e – 2022, f – 2024. A household’s identifier in an individual wave can be used to accurately merge data from several waves.

For example, to merge data from 2018 and 2013, each wave needs to be filtered first. The data are then merged such that the value of variable id_h in the 2013 wave data coincides with that of variable aid_h in the 2018 wave data.

Variable redidh stands for the household number in one wave. Cross-wave matches are not meaningful.

In the Individual Questionnaire file, variable id_w also indicates the year of the survey. Idind is continuous across all waves. This variable enables the merging of individual consumers’ data from different waves.

Variable id_h can be used to merge data for individual consumers and households in a single wave. The variable indicates the individual’s household in the wave. To merge individual and household data from several waves, each wave must be merged separately, since id_h can vary from wave to wave.

Variables id_i and redidi represent the number of a household in a given wave. Cross-wave matches are not meaningful.

The merged databases for the Household and Individual questionnaires for Waves 1–6 have more variables than the questionnaires themselves, so the variables missing from the questionnaires are empty. The Wave 5 databases for the Household and Individual questionnaires have the same number of variables as the questionnaires.

The constituent entity of the Russian Federation of the household is indicated by variable psu. The locality attribute of the constituent entity is not presented in the databases.