Monetary and Deprivation Poverty among Persons with Disabilities: The Role of Education and Employment

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between education, employment, and monetary and deprivation poverty among disabled people in Russia. The study draws on microdata from the 2023 Russian Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) Survey on the Quality and Accessibility of Services in Education, Healthcare, Social Services, and Employment Assistance (KDU). Monetary poverty is measured using the official national poverty threshold, while deprivation poverty is assessed using an index comprising ten deprivation indicators. Binary and multinomial logistic regression models are employed to identify factors associated with the various forms of poverty. The findings demonstrate that education and employment are related to monetary and deprivation poverty in different ways. Higher education is consistently associated with a lower probability of monetary poverty, whereas its association with deprivation poverty is considerably weaker. By contrast, employment exhibits the strongest relationship with deprivation poverty. Additionally, age, marital status, and self-rated health are significant correlates of poverty. Analysing factor contributions shows that regional affiliation accounts for a substantial proportion of the variation in both monetary poverty and deprivation poverty, especially the latter. The results suggest that monetary and deprivation poverty capture different dimensions of social disadvantage among disabled people and should therefore not be treated as interchangeable indicators. Deprivation poverty is more closely associated with opportunities for social integration and living conditions than with income levels per se. This finding highlights the potential of deprivation indicators as an additional tool for assessing the quality of life of disabled people and the effectiveness of regional social policy.