CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES TO THE INTEGRATED ASSESSMENT OF POPULATION WELFARE

Abstract

The article examines the evolution of approaches to assessing population welfare and analyzes the main composite indicators used for its measurement. The study investigates the chronology of generalized welfare indicators, analyzes their structural components, and identifies the advantages and limitations of existing methodological approaches. Economic thought has shifted the interpretation of welfare from a narrow focus on income and economic growth to a multidimensional category encompassing economic, social, demographic, environmental, and institutional aspects.
The paper reviews international approaches to measuring welfare, including objective indicators of living conditions, subjective assessments of life satisfaction, and integrated models. Analyzing widely used composite welfare indicators reveals their limitations in reflecting actual standards of living. Because economic metrics alone fail to account for the social and qualitative dimensions of human well-being, particular attention is paid to contemporary frameworks that combine material and non-material dimensions to assess the quality of life.
The study substantiates a socio-economic approach that incorporates material well-being, access to education and healthcare, environmental conditions, and opportunities for self-realization. Key requirements for a modern welfare assessment system in Ukraine are identified: using independent primary indicators, integrating statistical data with subjective population surveys, accounting for income inequality, and applying expert evaluation. Finally, the paper concludes that fuzzy logic methods and modern information technologies can significantly enhance composite indicator construction and socio-economic managerial decision-making