Problems of Information Support for Social Assistance to the Population During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The article deals with the actual problems of providing targeted social assistance to the population during the economic crisis. The research subject is a set of measures to stabilize the income of the population, implemented by the Government of the Russian Federation in 2020 during the most acute phase of the crisis associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of the research is to analyze and summarize the practice of social assistance to the population, to identify problems and prospects for using the monetary approach to neutralize the negative socio-economic consequences of the restrictions associated with the pandemic. The main aspects of the analysis involve measures to stabilize the income of the population, including measures to support employment in the economy and stabilize labor income, as well as measures of targeted social assistance to households implemented in Russian practice. In the research, the monetary approach is considered in a broad context, extended to the criteria determining the resource provision of households and the population property status, the characteristics underling the households grouping by the degree of need, and targeted assistance measures implemented in the cash transfers form. The results of the research revealed a number of problems with the monetary approach using in the implementation of the anti-crisis strategy in the Russian Federation in its simplified version, focused on the indicators of household monetary income without taking into account other components of disposable resources. Additional challenges in identifying targeted social assistance groups during the pandemic were associated with the established practice of building structural groupings of households, based on the dichromatic principle, as well as the transition from 2021 of russian statistics to the new principles of calculating the minimum subsistence level, which is the basic criterion for determining the property status of the population. Improving the effectiveness of social assistance measures to the population in the Russian Federation during economic crises involves adjusting the existing methodological and information base used in assessing the degree of household need. If detailed statistics are available, the corresponding monetary indicators can serve as an information basis for identifying the objects of targeted social assistance. Such indicators, by analogy with foreign practice, can also be supplemented by non-monetary characteristics that determine the degree of household need on other grounds, on the basis of combination of which their groups can be identified in accordance with the priorities and types of social assistance provided. The article was prepared within the framework of the RANEPA state task research.