General Assessment of the Effectiveness of Social Sphere Financing in Russia's Regions

The paper presents an approach to assessing the effectiveness of social sphere financing (healthcare, education, housing and utilities sector) in regions of Russia. In the framework of the study, we test the following hypothesis: when the socio-economic situation in a region gets better, the effectiveness of social sphere financing in it reduces. The methodology for studying the effectiveness of social sphere financing in regions with different levels of socio-economic development is based on assessing the dependence of the dynamics of the indicators achieved by them and the amount of budget expenditures. To carry out the assessment, we select nine resulting indicators of the functioning of social sectors, taking into account the list of indicators for assessing the effectiveness of performance of executive authorities of constituent entities of the Russian Federation (the list was approved in November 2017 by the decree of the President of the Russian Federation) and on the basis of the presence of a statistical relation between them and the Human Development Index as a final indicator. In addition, in order to take into account regional development specifics in the assessment of budget spending effectiveness, we arrange constituent entities of the Russian Federation into groups. The values of the indicators for the model are either calculated or taken directly from statistical reports of the Federal State Statistics Service, the Federal Treasury and the reports of the Analytical Center under the Government of the Russian Federation. We use multivariate correlation analysis to simulate the relationship between the financing of the social sphere and the resulting indicators. The evaluation carried out over a ten-year period shows low efficiency of financing of the social sphere in Russia. In regions with different levels of socio-economic development, it is clearly differentiated in the periods of economic instability. Only with the resolution of crisis phenomena in the socio-economic development of an underdeveloped region (high unemployment, ultra-high mortality, etc.) the urgency of spending on the development of human capital increases. With the achievement of best indicators of social and economic development in the region, the impact of budget financing on the quality of life of its population is reduced, which is explained by the decrease in the effectiveness of social financing in developed regions.