Teoretiko-methodological bases of social and economic forecasting of reforms

Public transformations of recent time in our country staticized the problem of prognosticresearches in the social sphere. Today social and economic forecasting is the major technology of social work. Forecasting represents one of themajor stages of design activity. Forecasting in a broad sense is prediction of the general reception of any information on the future. In the narrowsense it is a special scientific research, whose subject is prospects of development of phenomena. Social forecasting is prediction of tendenciesand prospects of possible development of social systems, objects, public phenomena, processes (labour collectives, regions, processes ofpopulation shift, child-bearing, etc.). All social systems, all phenomena in a society can be object of social forecasting. The main task offorecasting is scientific working out of forecasts. Forecast is a scientifically well-founded judgement about possible conditions of objects in thefuture or about other ways and terms of their realization. Forecast describes the future condition of the system. In development of methodologyof forecasting of social and economic processes scientific workings out of domestic and foreign scientists A.G. Aganbegjan, I.V. Bestuzhev,L. Klein, V. Goldberg played a big role. In works of these scientists the value, essence and forecast functions, its role and place in the planningsystem is considered, questions of methodology and organization of social forecast are investigated, features of scientific forecasting are shown.Qualitative and quantitative methods of research are applied to forecasts. By estimations of domestic and foreign scientists, there now exist over20 methods of forecasting. The basic objects of social design are social systems. Each social system possesses specificity, especial lines,elements, blocks, structure. Therefore, application of the forecasting technique should consider the specificity of social and economic objects offorecasting, namely: discrepancy of the social object; development of the social object; impossibility of the description of the final number ofterms of any social theory. There are many variants of lives of the social object. The presence of a set of subjective components, which definethe parity between the due and the real, concern the development of the social object. Subjective factors of formation are social expectations,social forecast and social structure. These factors define different criteria of estimation of the maturity of development of the social object. Thefactors listed above are not the final list of the reasons defining the specificity of social forecasting. Hence, in the course of systematizedscientifically well-founded forecasting of development of social and economic processes a methodology of forecasting was developed as sets ofmethods, receptions and ways of thinking allowing to deduce judgements of certain reliability concerning the future development on the basis ofthe analysis of the retrospective data, exogenous and endogenous communications of the object of forecasting, and their measurements withinthe considered phenomenon or process.

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