Using a Quasi Human Development index to assess human development in Russian Federation

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Lipetsk State Pedagogic University

Using a Quasi Human Development index to assess human development in Russian Federation

PhD in Geography, associate professor

Rostom G.R.

Abstract

An adjusted Quasi Human Development Index is proposed to perfect the assessing of human development. The adjustments concern two dimension: long and healthy life dimension, which is measured by days of healthy life lived index; and decent standard of living dimension, which is measured. by the share of population with incomes above the subsistence minimum index. On the example of the Russian Federation it is shown that the resulting spatial distribution of the Quasi HDI more precisely reflects differences among Russian Federation regions. A brief geographic analysis of the spatial distribution of the Quasi HDI and it's correlation with the UNDP HDI is given.

Key words: Quasi Human Development Index, UNDP Human Development Index, days of healthy life lived, poverty level, Russian Federation regions, spatial differences.

Аннотация

Предлагается скорректированный Квази Индекс Человеческого Развития для усовершенствования оценки человеческого потенциала территории. Корректировки касаются двух показателей: показателя долгой и здоровой жизни, который определен с помощью индекса дней, прожитых во здравии; а также показателя достойного уровня жизни, который определен по доле населения с доходами выше прожиточного минимума. На примере Российской Федерации показано, что пространственное распределение Квази ИЧР более точно отражает различия между российскими регионами. Дается краткий географический анализ пространственного распределения Квази ИЧР и его соотношения с ИЧР ПРООН.

Ключевые слова: квази индекс человеческого развития, индекс человеческого развития ПРООН, дни, прожитые во здравии, уровень бедности, субъекты Российской Федерации, пространственные различия.

An important objective of any regional study is to determine the spatial differences in development. There are thousands of indicators to assess spatial differences - individual indicators as well as composite indices. A recognized composite indicator of regional development is the HDI - “Human Development Index “. It is used to measure and compare the level of “Human development”, achieved by a country. The UNDP constantly improves the HDI to account for more subtle differences in the region, such as human poverty, gender inequality and other features. But the basis of the index are 3 dimensions : 1) long and healthy life , 2) knowledge , 3) a decent standard of living.

At the same time, there is no fixed list of dimensions of Human Development. That means that a country could develop and adjust the accounting of the Human development according to it's prevailing socio-cultural settings. Of course to compare different countries there should be one list of dimensions measured in the same way. But to develop the approaches of measuring Human Development and to get the most objective situation of the spatial differences within countries it is necessary to select the indicators that will objectively reflect the reality [1]. index human health life

For Russian realities of today, 2 of 3 dimensions of the HDI are not informative. They are indicators of the long and healthy life and the decent standard of living. For the long and healthy life dimension the standard HDI uses the index of life expectancy at birth. Many studies , including Murray CJL and Lopez AD [3] showed, that a more informative indicator is DALY - disability adjusted life years. For the decent standard of living dimension the standard HDI uses the index of per capita GDP. This index also has its drawbacks. In terms of Russian economy, not all income that is produced in the territory is counted for this territory. Many objects belong to companies based in entirely different regions and the production is counted for them. That is why some changes in the UNDP HDI dimensions were made.

Calculating new dimensions of Human Development. To assess the state of regional health the World Health Organization (WHO) proposed to investigate “The burden of disease” . The burden of disease is a set of differences between the actual state of health of the population and an ideal situation, where people not only live as long as possible , but live a healthy life without disease and disability. The bases of these differences are indicators of premature death and disability, also a number of risk factors that contribute to the disease.

To assess the burden of disease demographers use the life expectancy index, which measures losses from mortality in a certain area . The idea of using another index - losses of lifetime from disability - appeared recently in 1994. Christopher Murray and Alan Lopez [2] measured the burden of disease by generalized indicators that integrate life expectancy and losses of lifetime from disability. This index was called DALY (disability adjusted life years). The concept of measuring the global burden of disease in terms of DALY is today considered a comprehensive methodology for assessing morbidity and mortality. For each cause of death and morbidity DALY calculation includes the number of years of life lost and the number of years lived in conditions of various degrees of disability . DALY index is calculated based on two components:

DALY = YLL + YLD (1)

where: YLL - Years of Life Lost;

YLD - Years Lived with Disability [4]

The analysis of spatial distribution of DALY, YLL and YLD indices on the territory of Russian Federation [6] led to the following conclusion: because the extremely high value of YLL, when combined with the YLD index it absorbs it and makes the existing territorial differences in the distribution of DALY index very mean and irrelevant. In this regard the YLD index can be used by itself as an indicator of the long and healthy life.

Years Lived with Disability - YLD - is a period during which a person is to cease working due to illness or because of injury. It can be calculated according to the formula :

YLD = I x DW x L (2)

where: I - the number of cases ;

DW - weight coefficient of decease;

L - duration of disability in years.

For a better perception we propose to change the traditional unit of measurement and use the index inverse values. In that case it will be an index of “Days of healthy life lived by each person per year”.

It was stated above that the measurement of the living standard by the index of per capita GDP has several drawbacks. Especially in the context of Russia it can not objectively measure the standard of living of the population. Therefore, we propose another index - the share of the region's population with incomes above the subsistence minimum. The positive side of this index for our study is that for each region in Russia there is a scientifically based subsistence minimum. With it we can normalize income levels and get a more realistic picture of regional living standards. Russian statistics provides information on the share of the population with incomes below the subsistence minimum (poverty level) [5]. To Determine the inverse ratio is not difficult.

The integral Quasi HDI in Russia was calculated by using methods of mathematic normalization. Prefix “quasi” here means that the index is calculated at a slightly modified way. To do that, three measurements were used: 1 ) days of healthy life lived by each person per year; 2 ) the share of the region's population with incomes above the subsistence minimum; 3) the level of knowledge, that wass measured using the index of the share of students among population aged 7-24 years (Rosstat, 2014) . For each measurement corresponding indices for every region of Russia were identified. They were calculated by the standard formula:

(3)

where: fact Xi - the actual value of the index ;

min Xi- the minimum accepted value of the index ;

max Xi - The maximum value of the index.

To avoid the impact of the largest (or smallest) dimension, the overall aggregated index was calculated by geometric mean. The calculation results are shown in table 1.

Table 1. Statistics of the Quasi HDI and the UNDP HDI in Russian Federation

Source: [5, 4, authors' calculations]

Results and discussion

To optimize the data analysis all Russian Federation regions were distributed into 3 rating groups by the meaning of the HDI: group 1 with HDI more than 0.9; group 2 - with HDI from 0.89 to 0.84; group 3 - with HDI less than 0.83 (table 1).

Firstly, there is a difference between the spatial distribution of the UNDP HDI and the Quasi HDI. The number of regions with a high level of human development assessed by the Quasi HDI is bigger. It could be stated that the rating of almost all Russia regions rose up for one grade. The rating of ten Russian Federation regions rose up for two grades. The reason is a larger Healthy life index. One is Chelyabinsk Oblast in the Urals, six Central Russia regions (Belgorod, Kaluga, Kursk, Lipetsk, Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod Oblast), two Far East regions (Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and Magadan Oblast) and Republic of Dagestan in the Caucasus.

When comparing the components of the two HDI indexes, it appeared that the value of the Living standard index (a component of the Quasi HDI) in most of the Russia regions is a little lower than the value of the Income Index (a component of the UNDP HDI). The only exception regions are situated in the Caucasus region (Republics of Adygea, Dagestan, Ingushetia, North Ossetia -Alania). This means that one should pay more attention to this region in the economic consideration. To the opposite, the value of the Healthy life index (a component of the Quasi HDI) in all Russian Federation regions appeared higher than the value of the Life span index (a component of the UNDP HDI). The regions with the highest differences are situated in the Far East (Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and Jewish Autonomous Oblast, Magadan, Amur and Sakhalin Oblast, Republics of Tyva and Buryatia). This is a very promising sign because those regions never occur in any leader's lists. They are situated far from the country's centre, have suburb marginal position and basically low industrial potential.

The geographical features of the distribution of the Quasi HDI and the UNDP HDI in Russia have some things in common as well as some differences.

In common is the list of the traditionally leading regions. In European Russia capital cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg have high values of the component indexes. The Central Black Soil regions with warm climate and iron deposits have high values of the Living standard indexes. High rates of the “quasi HDI” at the Urals can be explained by high industrial potential of the territory and high educational level of the population. In Western Siberia almost all regions have high values of the indexes, except Altai Krai and Altai Republic. High values of the index are received due to exploiting oil, gas and coal deposits. Altai Krai and Altai Republic have no important mineral deposits and geographically are situated far from the Russia centre.

Differences between the Quasi HDI and the UNDP HDI in Russia are connected with the occurrence in the list of “Quasi HDI” leaders the Far East regions (Chukotka Avtonomny Okrug and the Magadan oblast) and some North Caucasus regions. Now we know that it happened due to the high value of the Healthy life index

It can be concluded, that the results of assessing one and the same phenomena can differ according to used dimensions. In our case we tried to reflect more precisely the situation in Russian regions by using modified Human Development index. When analyzing the resulting spatial differences, we should take into account the accepted modifications.

References

1. Chelovecheskoe razvitie: novoe izmerenie sotsialno_ekonomicheskogo progressa (Human development: a new dimension of social and economic progress - in Russian). Edited by prof. V.P. Kolesov (Economic Faculty of Moscow State University). 2-nd edition, enlarged and revised. - M .: Human Rights, 2008. - 636 p..

2. Murray CJL, Lopez AD, eds. The Global Burden of Disease: a comprehensive assessment of mortality and disability from diseases, injuries, and risk factors in 1990 and projected to 2030. // Global Burden of Disease and Injury Series. Vol. 1. - Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1996.

3. Murray CJL, Lopez AD. Assessing health needs: the Global Burden of Disease Study. // Oxford Textbook of Public Health. 4th ed. Edited by Detels R, McEwen J, Beaglehole R, Tanaka H. - New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. - P. 243-254.

4. National Human Development Report for the Russian Federation. Ed. by Prof. Sergey Bobylev. - Moscow: LLC RS Ilf, 2013.

5. Statistics database of Federal State Statistics Service of Russian Federation (Rosstat), 2014. URL: http://www.gks.ru (accessed May 20, 2014).

6. Rostom G. R. Adaptirovaniy dlya sub'ectov RF schyot pokazatelya utrachennih let zdorovoy zhizni (Assessment of indicator «Disability Adjusted Life Years» compiled for constituent entities of the Russian Federation - in Russian). // Voprosy statistiki. - 2013. -№ 10. P. 36 - 40.

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