The gap in the budget capacity of regions and the quality of living in the Russian Federation

The key purpose of the State is to improve its citizens' quality of living. Accordingly, social policy must serve this purpose. Each Russian citizen, regardless of his place of residence must receive a similar range of services from the State as guaranteed by the Constitution, which however does not occur in practice. Moreover, sharp inter-regional differentiation leads to an inevitably increasing number of lagging regions, weakening of the mechanisms of inter-regional economic cooperation and an increase in inter-regional conflicts, which greatly obstructs the implementation of a single nationwide policy of social and economic reforms. Russia should minimize inequality in the economic development of regions, which has intensified over the last decades. The studies of regional differentiation conducted based on different features (for example, the level of social and economic status and greening) provide results constituting the information basis for updating the state of stable development policies. However, in a federal state it is very difficult to ensure a uniform satisfaction of social needs. Thus, the state power encounters a problem related to the use of various instruments designated for ensuring equal opportunities for citizens to improve the quality of living. One of the main instruments is fiscal policy, since the authorities are the main supplier of public goods to the population and their financial security plays a decisive role. The purpose of this study is to prove that the Russian Federation has a significant gap in the regional budget capacity, which in turn leads to varying living conditions of population in different regions of the country and determines the causes and the major factor contributing to the formation of this indicator. This situation is perceived by the society as violation of the principles of social justice and may lead to increased efferent trends. With this in mind, the author has analyzed a number of subjects of the Russian Federation with regard to the citizens' fiscal capacity of citizens. The subjects were divided into 4 groups (subjects with the highest level of fiscal capacity, subjects with the average level of fiscal capacity, low-level fiscal capacity subjects and subjects of the Federation created based on the national principle). This enabled us to reveal general trends in the system of fiscal equalization within the framework of inter-budget relations and the key indicators that contributed to the formation of the gap between the subjects of the Russian Federation in terms of "fiscal capacity".

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