The advantage of the methodology we use for a comprehensive assessment of people’s well-being is that it allows us to do a territorial breakdown, that is, compare cities with each other, but also track the indicators over time. Actually, I’d like to think about this today, especially as the year draws to a close, which brings to mind the pre-New Year atmosphere of summarizing results.
As I noted above, the project in its current form has existed since 2016, but for us the main interest is the dynamics of the quality of life in Russia over the last 3-4 years. In general, quality of life can be assessed in several ways. The method I like best is to count “happy life years,” which is defined as the product of average life expectancy and the proportion of those who are completely or mostly satisfied with their existence. From our calculations it follows that this figure in 2020 was 51 years, and at the end of 2022 it rose to 53 years.
But this is a generalized assessment that does not give an idea of what processes are really taking place in our country. The estimates obtained when constructing our city rankings allow us to understand the dynamics of quality of life in more detail. It is built on the basis of the results of sociology and objective statistics of Rosstat. We are interested in the opinions of city residents on issues such as material well-being, affordability of real estate, quality of medicine and education, state of the environment, accessibility of culture, state of roads , housing and communal services, business conditions, prevalence of destructive behavior, anxiety, protest activity and many other components.
We take as a starting point the first quarter of 2020, when there was no Covid or large-scale anti-Russian sanctions. The socioeconomic consequences of the epidemic, and then the sanctions war declared by the collective West against our country, obviously contributed to a decline in quality of life assessments. However, it should be noted here that the coronavirus was a bigger shock for the Russians than the sanctions and their consequences. The epidemic has affected everyone; As for the economic problems of the past and the beginning of this year, Russians cannot say that they have not noticed them, but in reality their impact on the quality of life turned out to be quite weak. We can say that in terms of everyday life, we all escape with a slight scare.
So what changes in quality of life have we seen over the last year? First, the level of conflict in social relations has decreased markedly: Russians have less reason and desire to sue, and the number of legal disputes involving banks, insurance companies and other providers of goods and services has decreased. The assessment of the ecological environment has noticeably improved: here we include not only air pollution, but also water quality, as well as the absence of problems with garbage and landfills. It is not so noticeable, but there is still progress in assessing the state of road infrastructure (this includes the quality of the road surface, the work of public transport and traffic police). Assessments of the work of housing and communal services companies in maintaining the housing stock and maintaining urban amenities have been improved. There is progress in evaluating the effectiveness of the educational system. On the negative side, it is worth noting the decline in housing affordability, which is generally easy to understand given the rising cost of new construction in recent years.
And in the end I will say about the result, that I frankly liked it. We take the first quarter of 2020 as 100. Thus, at the end of this year, the final quality of life index slightly, but still, exceeded the initial value and amounted to 100.2 points. And that’s great: it seems like we’re on the right track.
THE NAIS IS OFFICIAL EDITOR ON NAIS NEWS