RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HEALTH INDICATORS AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE REGION

Abstract

Health is the most important characteristic of human and labor potential; it is a vital value, a condition and a guarantee of a full life not only for any person, but also for the society as a whole. Experts of the world health organization have proved that improving the quality and increasing the life expectancy of the population leads to the acceleration of economic development of the state, the growth of its GDP [1, p. 138]. Poor health, on the contrary, has a significant economic damage. Health of the population is a key indicator of the health care system performance. There is a close relationship between health care and all sectors of the national economy, which determines: influence of public health and health care on the development of the national economy as a whole and its individual branches[2, p. 131-136]; the impact of the economy of certain industries on the health of the population. The first attempt to describe this relationship was made in 1975 by Samuel Preston. The Preston curve describes the relationship between life expectancy in a given calendar period and a country's gross domestic product, a measure of current per capita income and, to a large extent, the level of economic development. The Preston curve shows that people born in more prosperous countries, on average, can expect to live longer than those born in poorer ones do. In this study, we consider the relationship between public health and socio-economic development of Russian regions. The analysis was performed by pairwise calculation of the correlation between indicators of socio-economic development of 85 regions of the Russian Federation and their indicators of the health care and public health. In order to obtain representative results, the coefficients were also calculated for the regions of the Volga Federal district and an attempt to compare the obtained results was made. There were only 14 correlations of indicators that had a level of association with the dependent variable higher than 0.7. At the same time, it is worth noting that only four of them have a correlation coefficient higher than 0.7 for all regions of Russia and the regions of the Volga Federal district. In our opinion, low correlation between health indicators and indicators of socio-economic development of regions is not the basis for the assertion of its absence, but indicates the need for more thorough mathematical calculation, which is the object of further research.