DIAGNOSTICS OF SOCIAL POTENTIAL REALISATION OF THE RUSSIAN ARCTIC REGIONS FROM THE POSITIONS OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

At the post- industrial stage of development of particular significance is the realization of social potential as part of the national (regional) wealth and human potential. At the same time the existing institutional structure (educational system, health authorities, social security, public services, etc.) determine not only the quality of the political system, but also the level of the society development, the life quality of the population as a whole. Given the fact that the main factor is the social potential of the population, as well as the institutions that create conditions for its implementation, the content of social potential is seen as a set of options available to the territorial entity of sustainable development in order to ensure a high quality of life. The unique geo- political and geo-economic potential of the Russian Arctic territory allows positioning it as an area of the social responsibility of the state. Due to the fact that the development of the Arctic regions, Russia as a whole, in the 21st century will be determined predominantly by the level of the social potential, specific tools are required to perform assessment of its size and dynamics. Their application will help to clarify the priorities of social policy, as well as the formation of the complex measures for their implementation, depending on the features of regional development. With the development of tools evaluating implementation of the elements of regional capacity, including social ones, the following provisions were adopted as fundamental: - consideration of a balanced development as one of the imperatives of sustainable development; - adoption of a balanced level of all the subsystems of the region, as a criterion and the magnitude of the regional capacity; - use as the characteristics of the social potential of performance indicators that reflect the impact on the regional development of the quality of education, health status, living standards, etc. This paper presents methodological tools for assessing the implementation of the elements of regional potential, based on the use of principal-factor method, which is part of an integrated multi-factor analysis of the variability of structures allowing to investigate the influence of the analyzed factors on the total variance. The authors propose an approach that, in contrast to the classical interpretation of the principalfactor method results, takes into account the impact on the development of a complex dynamic system, which is the region, in the first place, all the major components, and, second, each factor separately. The results of the approbation of these tools on information files of the Russian Federation regions subjects for 2000-2010 in the section of the social potential testify to a lower, than the whole across Russia, level of its realization in the regions of the Russian Arctic.