Methodological Aspects of Analysis of Competition in Regional Markets of Services for Children with Disabilities

The modern development of social services markets is aimed at introducing competition mechanisms into them. These trends create the need to develop and use a methodology for assessing competition, taking into account the characteristics of each market. Existing methods for calculating various indices are labor-intensive for social markets and do not take into account their specifics: a significant share of government institutions, a narrow segment of consumers, and significant differentiation in prices for services. The article proposes a methodology for analyzing competition in the market of psychological and pedagogical support for children with disabilities, based on the use of two groups of indicators: objective and subjective indicators. To analyze subjective assessments, a coefficient of satisfaction with the price-quality ratio is proposed. Statistical indicators are used as objective assessments. The proposed methodology was tested using the example of markets for psychological and pedagogical support for children with disabilities in a number of regions of Russia. The results obtained allowed us to draw a conclusion about the state of competition in the markets under consideration and identify “problem” regions. The presented methodology allows us to obtain relatively adequate results of the analysis of competition in the market of psychological and pedagogical support for children with disabilities and can be extended to other markets in the social sphere with appropriate adjustments.