Russians Feel Inflation Is Higher Than Officials Say. Are They Correct? |
People generally have little faith in statistics and the overwhelming majority of Russians are convinced that Rosstat deliberately understates inflation. When asked not about their trust in statistics but about how they personally feel price growth (hereafter, “observed inflation”), Russian respondents always give figures that are significantly higher than the official ones.
If we compare the population’s answers in relevant surveys with Rosstat’s monthly inflation data, we find that between May 2022 and October 2025, inflation as observed by Russians was on average 1.8 times higher than inflation recorded by Rosstat. If we take the period from late 2015 to May 2022, the gap is even larger — 2.5 times.
The problem is that people in every country observe inflation as being higher than the official measure, thanks to well-studied factors that distort their perception.
This raises the question of how much higher observed inflation is in other countries compared to official figures. If observed inflation in Russia is higher than actual inflation across countries to a similar degree, we may be able to have more faith in Rosstat’s data.
Below is a table comparing official and observed inflation for several countries from May 2022 to October 2025.
Additionally, I calculated the observed versus official inflation rates over a longer period and found them largely similar to the numbers in this chart. It is noticeable that the ratio between observed and official inflation in a given country does not change much depending on the time period. I would venture to suggest that this ratio is relatively stable and depends more on a country’s cultural and political characteristics than on the specific time periods (or phases of the economic cycle) used for comparison.
That said, substantiating such a hypothesis would require a much broader dataset.
I selected countries for comparison based solely on how easy it was to find data on inflation as perceived by the population. There is far more data on expected inflation, since this matters to central banks, but it is unclear what it can be meaningfully compared to.
Some of the figures are surprising. Data from Greece is particularly striking: despite living in the eurozone, Greeks manage to “observe” inflation that is higher even in absolute terms than what Russians observe. All EU data come from a........