Socio-Economic and Demographic Motivators of the Life Quality of Rural Population in the Russian Federation

The paper considers the problem of socio-economic development of rural areas from the perspective of the assessment of life quality, briefly describes the main approaches to existing methodologies and provides the substantiation of their nonapplicability for using in rural territories of the Russian Federation. The author proposed a generic and simplified methodology for the assessment of the life quality of rural population that takes into account the demographic, social, and economic conditions. Evaluation criteria in the context of a three-phase scale (from 0 to 2 points) are proposed. The paper assesses the indicators of natural and migration growth, birth and mortality rates, life expectancy, residential landscaping, the proportion of the population that lives in flimsy dwellings, the provision of quality healthcare, information, educational services, the share of poor citizens, the unemployment rate and the ratio of incomes to the subsistence minimum. The calculations are done for all regions of the Russian Federation as a general rate indicator and its individual elements, from which the conclusions on the necessity of the use of certain institutional motivators are drawn.