Life satisfaction during the COVID-19 pandemic among different income groups in Russia

The paper examines the relationship between income inequality and life satisfaction during the coronavirus pandemic in Russia. The restrictive measures caused by the pandemic led to an economic crisis, which manifested itself including falling employment and incomes. Governments responded to these challenges by adopting anti-crisis aid packages, aimed at supporting particularly vulnerable groups. While the effects of these measures are better understood at the macro level, gaps remain at the individual level. Although it is clear that citizens from high-income groups have coped better with the pandemic, it remains unclear which mechanism is responsible for this: differences in the risks of getting sick, the risks of losing a job, or differences in anxiety levels. Using data from four waves of the Values in Crisis project, we use T-tests, principal component analysis, and panel regression to show that the strongest mechanism explaining the difference in life satisfaction between the “rich” and the “poor” is the increase in anxiety. The findings are important for understanding the optimization of overcoming inequality, especially during periods of external shocks.