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Alcoholism and drug addiction are serious social diseases that have a negative impact on many socio-economic indicators. The article presents the results of a study of alcoholism and drug addiction in Russia at the regional level: current data are given, regions with the best and worst values are highlighted, and dynamics over the past 15 years is shown. Despite positive changes and a decrease in officially registered cases of alcoholism and drug addiction in Russia, the real picture does not seem so rosy, and the negative impact of alcoholism and drug addiction on the most important indicators of quality of life and human potential remains high, that is confirmed by the results of this study. An attempt was made to find the causes for discrepancy between official data and real ones, as well as to identify the functional relationships of the studied indicator with other indicators of human potential and quality of life that can act as causes or consequences of alcoholism and drug addiction. According to the results of the correlation analysis, taking into account direct and reverse time lags for 8 years for 10 socio-economic indicators, there was revealed an extremely negative impact of alcoholism and drug addiction on the most important indicators of human potential, primarily on life expectancy, infant mortality, and the number of crimes and murders. The prospects for further research on the topic are described based on the experience gained in the course of this study.

Human potential and quality of life are the most important socio-economic categories. On the one hand, development of society is connected with improvement of the quality of life of people and realization of their human potential. On the other hand, it is human potential that is currently the main driving force contributing to economic growth, scientific and technological progress and cultural development of the country. Despite this, there is still no clear definition and unified measurement system for these categories. Abroad, there is no concept of human potential in general, although many concepts appeal to this very category. This review article attempts to define these complex social categories and clearly distinguish between them. In the course of the work, the chronology of development of these concepts, their evolution from related concepts and interpretation by modern concepts were analyzed. There were shown the fundamental differences between human potential and quality of life lying in different research objects. If quality of life mainly reflects external conditions of life, then human potential has as an object of study qualitative characteristics of population and therefore can be called quality of population by analogy with the definition of quality of life. The author also gave analysis of two modern concepts of sustainable and human development, identified their main principles, goals and objectives, and compared them with each other. As a result, it was concluded that these two concepts are almost identical and interchangeable. Besides, both of them are concepts of improving the quality of life, their main goal is to create favorable external conditions in which a person can freely develop and realize his aspirations and needs.

Human potential and quality of life are the most important socio-economic categories. On the one hand, development of society is connected with improving the quality of life of population and realizing its human potential. On the other hand, it is human potential that is currently the main driving force contributing to economic growth, scientific and technological progress and cultural development of the country. Despite this, there is still no clear definition and unified measurement system for these categories. Abroad, there is no concept of human potential at all, although many concepts appeal to this very category. This review article attempts to define these complex social categories and clearly distinguish them. In the course of the work there were analyzed the chronology of the development of these concepts, their evolution from other related concepts and their interpretation by modern concepts. The article shows the fundamental differences between human potential and quality of life that lie in different research objects. If quality of life mainly reflects the external conditions of life, then human potential has as an object of study the qualitative characteristics of population and therefore can be called the quality of population by analogy with the definition of the quality of life. The author also gave an overview of two modern concepts of sustainable and human development, identified their main principles, goals and objectives, and compared them with each other. As a result, it was concluded that the two concepts are almost identical and interchangeable. Besides, they are both the concepts of quality of life improvement, their main goal is to create favorable external conditions, in which a person can freely develop and realize his aspirations and needs.

The development of scientific and technical potential in the regions of Russia is an important task, without which it is difficult to imagine the competitiveness of the domestic economy. On the other hand, innovative development is closely related to such a social category as the human potential of the population. The article presents the results of a correlation analysis between indicators of scientific and technical potential, reflecting the resource component and the results of innovative activity of regions, on the one hand, and indicators of human potential, in particular, its physical aspect, on the other. The results obtained confirmed the absolute positive correlation between the indicators of scientific and technical potential and positive factors of human potential (life expectancy, natural population growth, the spread of education, visits to museums and theaters), as well as a negative relationship with negative factors of human potential (the level of addiction). The factors of scientific and technical potential that are most sensitive to the values of human potential indicators are revealed: internal costs for research and development, internal costs for technological innovation, the number of advanced production technologies used. A more detailed correlation analysis was carried out with the study of time lags separately for each region between the indicators of scientific and technical potential and three indicators of the physical aspect of human potential: life expectancy, natural population growth, the spread of alcoholism and drug addiction. The results obtained indicate that life expectancy is the strongest positive indicator of human potential, positively affecting the scientific and technical potential, and the spread of alcoholism and drug addiction is the strongest negative factor negatively associated with indicators of scientific and technical potential.

The article provides the results of a correlation analysis of the functional relationships between indicators of quality of life and human potential in Russia. The study was conducted on the basis of regional statistics for the period from 2010 to 2018 with the account of time series. While the notion of quality of life describes rather conditions of life, human potential reflects qualitative characteristics of population. Human potential is considered in a broad sense as a set of population characteristics that act as opportunities for realization and comprehensive development of a person in accordance with his aspirations and needs. In the author's view, human potential is of a paramount importance in the development of society and man, and quality of life acts as a factor designed to maintain and develop it. This determines the relevance of the topic of this study, aimed at finding functional relationships between the indicators of quality of life and human potential. The author selected 6 indicators of human potential: natural population growth, educational attainment, visits to museums and theaters, life expectancy, incidence of alcoholism and drug addiction, and crime rates. There were also selected 13 indicators of quality of life: population with income below the subsistence minimum, life expectancy, infant mortality rate, morbidity, number of doctors of all specialties, population with higher and secondary professional education, provision of places for preschool children in educational institutions, number of students, average per capita income, R/ P10% ratio, Gini coefficient, number of recorded crimes, unemployment rate. Some indicators are both indicators of the quality of life and indicators of the quality of population that made it possible to identify functional relationships between various aspects of human potential. The correlation analysis carried out in general for all years and regions discovered a number of regularities and allowed us to construct hypotheses, which were further tested in the regional context with the account of time series. The results of the analysis allow us to draw conclusions about strong impact of monetary income, poverty and unemployment on most indicators of human potential. There were also found relationships between the components of human potential themselves, such as life expectancy, crime rates, incidence of alcoholism and drug addiction. In addition, there was identified a number of regularities in the relationships between individual indicators of human potential and socio-economic indicators of quality of life. The relationships found also include: impact of crime on inequality, of infant mortality on natural population growth, etc.