Typology of Russian regions according to human potential indicators

The article presents the results of creatiing a typology of the country’s regions according to the characteristics of various components of human potential. The purpose of the study is to group regions by the level of human potential development and identify exemplary and lagging regions among them in this aspect. The object of the study is 85 Russian regions and indicators of their human potential. First, 22 indicators of human potential were considered, characterizing various aspects of human potential: demographic, labor, educational, cultural, environmental and related to social health, including its negative components - alcohol consumption and crime. Further, the selected indicators were analyzed and checked for multicollinearity, resulting in 9 indicators reflecting life expectancy, fertility, morbidity, the proportion of highly skilled workers, the proportion of managers and specialists, alcohol consumption, the number of visits to museums and theaters, the number of divorces, environmental behavior. Creation of a typology was carried out using the methods of cluster analysis: hierarchical and k-means. The official statistics data on the socio-economic development of the regions for 2021 were used. As a result of clustering, 9 groups of regions were obtained, from 1 to 22 regions in the group. Each group is given a meaningful characteristic. The grouping of regions differs greatly from the usual typologies of economic development. For example, the Moscow and Leningrad oblasts are defined as «below average» in terms of human potential characteristics, while the highly economically developed Republic of Tatarstan and the subsidized Pskov oblast are in the same group. The resulting typology expands our understanding of the regional differentiation of human potential and allows us to take a different look at the level of its development in separate regions and their groups. The main benefit of the presented typology is that groups with high values of human potential indicators should become the objects of analysis of the effective measures implemented by regions, thanks to which the regions have achieved good results. This experience should be extended to other regions that are less successful in terms of human development.