“Who Lives Well in Russia?”

Abstract

This article analyzes life satisfaction in Russia’s population over the last two decades, as well as its determinants, based on OECD methodology and data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of the Higher School of Economics (RLMS-HSE). It shows that in Russia, which during its transformational period went through each phase of the business cycle with high oscillation amplitude, life satisfaction is more closely connected to the main economic indicators than in countries that have not experienced similar economic and social shocks. The way life satisfaction and its main determinants are correlated in Russia is similar to what we see in several other countries, but the specific values and forms of these connections depend on the particular motions of the economic cycle in any given country, as well as the previous path (model) of its development.

Keywords:

• life satisfaction
• economic crisis
• work
• income
• Russia

This article is the republished version of:

“Who Lives Well in Russia?”

Notes

¹. Russian Monitoring of the Economic Situation and Health of the Population, NRU HSE (RLMS-HSE), is conducted by the National Research University Higher School of Economics and ZAO Demoskop, with the participation of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (for results of the project RLMS-HSE, see www.hse.ru/org/hse/rlms, www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/rlms-hse>).