Assessing the level of social development in Russia’s regions: methodological and applied aspects

Modern research works contain a large number of different approaches to assessing the level of socio-economic development of territories; as for the techniques that assess economic development of territories, they are not so numerous; and the techniques for assessing social development of territories are encountered even less often. We put forward our own approach to assessing the level of social development in Russia’s regions and consider population (consumer of social services) and the social sphere (subsystem of services provision) as the object of managing social development of the territory. The article proposes a technique for assessing the level of development of the territorial socio-economic system using Amartya Sen’s modified social welfare function, taking into account adjustments for the characteristics of management object components: quality of life, social infrastructure and social services. We determine adjustment factors and carry out the testing on the data for 2014-2021 in the context of Russia’s constituent entities; we form a rating of regions according to the level and specifics of social development and identify four groups of regions: “social development leaders”, “socially developing”, “socially slowing down” and “socially undeveloped” regions.