Living conditions and the quality of life in cities of the Far East

The article presents the results of the study of living conditions and the quality of life in cities of the Far East of Russia in terms of objective and subjective approaches. The objective approach is based on the analysis of the following indicators: cost of living; average monthly wage; unemployment rate; number of population with monetary income below the subsistence level; relative balance of migration; intensity of arrival and departure; natural growth rate. The subjective approach consists in analyzing subjective assessments of living conditions and quality of life in Far Eastern cities on the basis of the data of the complex observation of living conditions of the population in 2014. The empirical object of study is the adult population (15 years and older) of Blagoveshchensk, Birobidzhan, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Magadan, Vladivostok, Yakutsk, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Khabarovsk, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, and Anadyr. The total sample consisted of 1,827 people. The cities under consideration are the administrative centers of constituent entities of the Far East Federal District, the exception is Komsomolsk-on-Amur, but its choice is not accidental, since a significant outflow of population is recorded there, which can indicate an unfavorable social and economic situation in the city. The purpose of this study is to identify the differentiation of objective parameters and subjective assessments of people’s living conditions and quality of life and its relationship with the characteristics of the city and the population of Far Eastern cities. The data provided by the Federal State Statistics Service allowed us to describe the socio-economic context in the cities, which provided a deeper interpretation of the results obtained in the analysis of the data of the complex observation of living conditions of the population. Thus, we have identified a connection between the attractiveness of life, migration flows and subjective assessments of living conditions in Far Eastern cities. We classified Far Eastern cities into four types according to the level of attractiveness of life on the basis of subjective estimations of the population by means of the cluster analysis. We also consider the differentiation of subjective assessments of living conditions and quality of life, identify groups of urban problems and characteristics of the population concerned about different problems in the city.