The average monthly Russian wage in U.S. Dollars was on par with salaries in Kazakhstan in 2015, the RBC news website reported Tuesday.
The weak ruble caused the average Russian monthly salary to total just $558 last year, a 34 percent decrease compared to 2014, a report from Moscow's Higher School of Economics (HSE) found.
In comparison, the average monthly wages in Kazakhstan and Belarus last year were $549 and $415 respectively.
Between the years of 2011 and 2015, wages in Russia were consistently higher than in other former Soviet countries. In 2014, Russian saw their earnings shrink by 10 percent compared to 2013 to $847 a month. Experts have noted that the salary gap between Russia and other post-soviet nations is gradually decreasing, RBC reported.
The Russian ruble started to sharply lose its position against the US dollar in 2014 amid a slump in global oil prices. The weakening ruble helped push the annual inflation to 12.9 percent in 2015 and resulted in the 9.5 percent decline in Russians’ real wages.
