Approaches to Studying the Quality and Standard of Living in Russia

The paper presents the major approaches to study the population’s standard of living. It describes current trends of the main indicators of various aspects of people’s lives, including the population’s quality of life, welfare, social issues, services available to the population, and environmental conditions. The favorable and negative trends in the development of a number of indicators under study have been identified. The authors have presented their methodology to develop an indicator of the population’s standard of living, which includes 40 specific indicators corresponding to various aspects of people’s standard of living. The advantage of the proposed methodology is the possibility to take into account a wide range of indicators provided as part of official statistics, representing an objective picture of the people’s standard of living as well as the universal nature of the proposed indicator in terms of traceability of its measurements over time, which allows identifying the changes in the Russian regions and taking corrective actions in due time.