Regional Human Development in Ukraine in the Pre-War Period: Evaluation, Features, Trends

In Ukraine, fruitful long-term research has been carried out both in the field of human development assessment methodology development, which was mainly focused on creating a tool for assessing relevant processes at the regional level, and in the field of practical assessment of the current state of human development processes in the context of sustainable human development goals. An important stage in this research was the next update of the methodology for calculating the Regional Human Development Index (RHDI), which took place in 2012. The purpose of the article is to summarise the results of research conducted by the Ptoukha Institute of Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in the field of assessing the state of human development by regions of Ukraine, based on long-term calculations of the Regional Human Development Index (HDI). The relevant analysis allows for the most thorough assessment of the pre-war human development situation in Ukraine, which should further serve as a basis for the losses in human development achieved by Ukraine and its regions (in particular, in certain aspects of human development) that occurred as a result of the war. The novelty of the article is that it further develops the research in the field of regional human development, in particular, assessing the pace of the relevant processes and the achieved state of development in the pre-war period, based on the statistical base of the HDI. In order to achieve the research objective, the following research methods were used: economic and statistical analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis, cartographic analysis of scientific generalisations and comparisons. In general, the study carried out a multidimensional grouping of the regions of Ukraine by the method of hierarchical clustering according to the HDI indicators, both by the value of the integral indicator and by the specifics of the dynamics of human development processes over time, which allowed to determine a stable grouping of regions by the level of human development.