Sustainable Development Goals: How Far Has Our Country Moved Towards a Happy Future?

All SDGs can be divided into three groups: social, environmental and governance. Social ones include the elimination of poverty and hunger everywhere; improving nutrition, water and sanitation; ensuring a healthy lifestyle, quality education, gender equality, access to energy sources, full, effective and decent employment, safe settlements; reducing inequality within and between countries.

Environmental issues include combating climate change; preserving and rationally using the world's oceans and marine resources; protecting and restoring terrestrial ecosystems; and implementing rational consumption and production models.

Management objectives include promoting effective economic growth, creating sustainable infrastructure, industrialization and innovation; building peaceful and open societies; access to justice for all; developing effective governance institutions and activating global partnership mechanisms.

This resolution became the first and to this day remains the only international act that provides a legal basis for systematically assessing the progress of different countries along the path of sustainable development and the ability to foresee the exacerbation of problems that are painful for one’s country and plan their solution, which is relevant not only for underdeveloped countries, but also for highly developed ones, including Russia.

In addition to the goals, the resolution contains 169 tasks that specify them. I will illustrate them with two of the seven tasks for achieving the goal of eradicating poverty, which have quantitative indicators (in total, the UN has defined 279 such indicators).

The first is to ensure that no one anywhere is forced to live on less than $2.15 per person per day (the World Bank has just raised this absolute poverty line to $3, adjusted for inflation). International statistics show that such people exist not only in the poorest countries, but also in the richest ones – at least two per thousand inhabitants.

3 dollars is, at the current exchange rate of our Central Bank, approximately 240 rubles per day, or 7,200 rubles per month. According to Rosstat, in 2024, an average of 0.6% of Russians had incomes of up to 7 thousand rubles, and in the poorest regions - Tuva, Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkaria - the share of such people was 3-5 times higher. This means that about a million of our fellow citizens live in absolute poverty, and the task of lifting them out of such a dire situation remains very urgent for Russia.

The second task is to reduce by at least half the proportion of people living below the national poverty line by 2030. Russia will likely cope with it five years before the end of the term: in 2015, the proportion of those whose income was below the official poverty line was 13.5%, in 2024 - 7.2%, almost half as much (given that this level - the average per capita subsistence minimum in the country - has risen during this time from 9.7 to 16.8 thousand rubles).

Based on the information resources of the UN and other international organizations, I have so far managed to analyze 20 indicators in the field of sustainable development, for which there is comparable data for many countries. This allows us to compare Russian data with the average values ​​of these indicators for 12 countries - key members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development: Australia, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy, Canada, Portugal, the USA, France, Switzerland, Sweden and Japan.

In addition to the already mentioned proportion of the population below the poverty line, these are indicators of malnutrition, tuberculosis, maternal mortality in childbirth, stunting in children, birth rate among girls aged 15–19, organized education of preschool children, qualifications of school teachers, prevalence of smoking, proportion of women in national parliaments and in decision-making positions, access to safe water supply, pressure on water resources, unemployment, proportion of youth neither working nor studying, income inequality, share of wages of employees in GDP, expenditure on R&D, share of high-tech and knowledge-intensive industries in GDP, and the share of researchers in the country's population.

How does Russia compare to the US and the OECD on all these indicators?

The share of the population living below the national poverty line in Russia (7.2%) is approximately the same as in the US, but 2.3 times lower than in the OECD (17%). However, it should be borne in mind that the subsistence minimum, which determines this line, in Russia is equal to 200 dollars, and this is ten times less than in the US, and 5-8 times less than in OECD countries.

The incidence of tuberculosis, which has long been considered a companion of poverty, is similar to poverty: 2.6 people out of 100 thousand residents in Russia and the USA suffer from it, and 6.7 in the OECD.

But the share of malnourished people in our country (3.8%) is one and a half times higher than in the US and the OECD. The situation with stunted growth among children under five is even worse: 3.4% of children in the OECD suffer from it, 3.6% in the US, and 12.7% in Russia — more than three times higher. Both of these indicators confirm that the Russian subsistence minimum does not guarantee nutrition that satisfies the body's natural needs. Over the past 10 years, the subsistence minimum has grown by 83%, but this is clearly not enough, so the most important duty of the state should be to increase it as soon as possible at least to the level of China, where it is, depending on the region, from 300 to 500 dollars.

People need water no less than food. The share of the population using safe water supply services in Russia is 96.9%, in the US 97.5%, in the OECD 98.4. These seem to be very high figures, and we are lagging behind only a little. However, those who are not provided with safe water are 3.1% in our country, compared to 2.5% in the US and 1.6% in the OECD. And that is 4.5 million Russians whose health is harmed by the water they use.

This situation is even more intolerable because the level of water resource load (the share of fresh water withdrawal in its reserves) in our country is almost the lowest in the world: 1.35% (in the USA 28.2, in the OECD 14.0%). In Israel, a country with a water resource load of at least 80%, 99.5% of the population is provided with safe water supply. So we cannot have insurmountable obstacles, and safe water for everyone should also become a priority task for the state.

As for maternal mortality during childbirth, in Russia it is 10.6 per 100 thousand live births, which is slightly less than the OECD average (9.0), but half as much as in the US (21.1). And in terms of the number of births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19, Russia (13.4) is almost the same as the US, but more than twice as high as the OECD.

In terms of the share of smokers among people aged 15 and over, Russia (29.2%) is no longer as different from the US (24.3%) and the OECD (22.0%) as it was in the early 2000s. The same thing worked for us as it did in these countries several decades earlier: as their wealth grows, people begin to value their health more as a necessary condition for leading a lifestyle they enjoy. I think that the establishment of high prices for tobacco products and restrictions for smokers also played a certain role.

In Russia, 86.5% of children participate in organized types of education during the year before the official age of entering school, in the USA 95.7%, in the OECD 92.9%. Apparently, the relevant departments should pay attention to the insufficient use of this resource for preparing for school. As well as to the fact that the share of teachers with the minimum required qualifications in our country is 97.1%, while “theirs” is 100%.

In terms of women's equality, the picture is mixed. In Russia, they occupy almost half of all leadership positions (48.8%) - slightly more than in the US (42.6%), and one and a half times more than in the OECD (33.8%). However, in the "major league" - among members of their parliaments - their share in Russia is significantly smaller: 17.9% versus 29.1% in the US and 33.5% in the OECD.

Our unemployment rate is lower than in the US and the OECD: 3.2% versus 3.6 and 4.7. And the share of young people aged 15 to 24 who are neither working nor studying is also somewhat lower: 8.7% versus 11.2% in the US and 9.5% in the OECD.

In terms of income inequality in the country (Gini coefficient), we are quite close: Russia has 40.5%, the US has 41.3, and the OECD has 36.2%.

But in terms of the share of wage earners' income in GDP, Russia differs significantly: its 40% is almost one and a half times less than 59% in the US and 58% in the OECD. This means that when comparing the actual consumption volumes of wage earners in these countries by per capita GDP, a reduction coefficient of 1.5 should be applied to our country.

The last three indicators characterize the scientific and technical level of countries: the ratio of R&D expenditure to GDP, the share of high-tech and science-intensive industries in GDP, and the number of researchers per million residents. Unfortunately, we are lagging behind in all three, and very much so. In the first (we have 1%), we are 3.5 times behind the US, 2.5 times behind the OECD, in the second (we have 22.2%), twice as much as both, in the third (we have 2.6 thousand people), twice as much as the OECD and 60% behind the US.

This says little about the country's current capabilities (many countries live happily without a noticeable role in this sphere), but it determines the long-term prospects of its place in the international division of labor and competition. And this is a sphere where the lag becomes irreversible over the years. I think the point of no return is close, and the readiness to prevent this is also a question of our responsibility to our children and grandchildren.