Influence of Socioeconomic Factors on Economic Development of Russian Regions

The relationship between economic indicators and socio-economic factors has been the subject of a large number of studies that have examined various aspects of this relationship. The results indicated that the relationship between indicators of economic development and socio-economic factors differs for developed and developing countries. Consequently, a hypothesis was formed that such differences can be found not only between countries but also between regions of one country. Russian Federation was chosen as the object of this research as its diverse socio-economic environment influences the formation of regional economic systems with varying levels of development. This paper assumes that the nature of the regional relationship between socio-economic factors and economic development is different as well. Thus, it was decided to analyze all regions of the country as well as the group of the most developed regions and compare the obtained models to see whether there is truly a different relationship between them. It was also hypothesized that although income per capita is often used to assess the level of economic development in scientific researches, it is inadequate since the use of a single indicator for assessing economic development can form a misleading perception about the level of economic development. Hence, pairing it with other indicators would supposedly contribute to a better understanding of the investigated relationship. During the assessment of regional economic development, average life expectancy was used as an auxiliary indicator. This allowed to eliminate errors, which most likely appeared due to using a one factor model of income per capita, which indicated that the initial hypothesis was not rejected.