Ideas and Ideals

The problems of environmental safety measurement of territorial entities in the Russian Federation are presented and discussed in the article. The overview of relevant investigations in the environmental safety field is given. The system of initial statistical indicators on a real group (municipal districts of Novosibirsk Region) is formed and tested. The author presents a generalized index of environmental safety based on three indicators: the level of social and economic development, the level of ecological conditions and the level of human resources of the region. The research includes the classification of the Novosibirsk region municipalities on the basis of the environmental safety level. The method of typological grouping (the variety was divided into three groups with equal intervals) and the cluster analysis method (the method of "nearest-neighbor" was applied), and the portfolio analysis matrix were used. The three-dimensional matrix of portfolio analysis is proposed and tested on the actual data during the investigation. The matrix has three coordinate axes that correspond to environmental safety indicators: the level of social and economic development, the level of ecological conditions, and the level of human resources. The convergence of the results of different partitioning algorithm was estimated. This technique adequately estimates the environmental safety for all management levels: municipal, regional and federal. The main advantage of this approach is the opportunity of a territory analysis as well as a dynamic one. The investigation results broaden instrumental and informational opportunities in developing adequate strategies of ecological safety management both for a separate territorial unit and for homogeneous groups. Official data of the Federal State Statistics Service were used for the calculation of indicators.

The territorial statistics as the system of collection of information about a condition of social and economic processes became an example of complex study of the situation in the agrarian sector of the Russian society of the second half of the 19th century. It was perceived as an illustration of additional opportunities of local governments in the post-reform period. Considerable volumes of the obtained statistical data served both as the basis for definition of territorial tax levies and the empirical base of notice able theoretical research. The programs of territorial observations included several methods of data collection. The sample budget survey of farm households became one of the directions of research in the district councils. Innovations of the territorial statistics also concerned the ways of tabular processing of obtained in formation. Programs of research, methods of data collection and ways of its processing make it possible to consider practice of territorial statistical descriptions as an important prerequisite of the development of empirical sociology and practice of sociological research in our country.

At the end of the 1980s in the context of the policy of «opening of the archives»” historians got an access to government statistics on repressions of the Soviet era. With the obvious advantages of a centralized accounting of repressions significant gaps in the accounting and dynamics control of deported to special settlements peasantry in the 1930 1931 years were revealed. Deportation and the creation from the very beginning of special settlements could not but cause disruption and misrepresentation of statistical reporting, such a kind of information is called «gray hole». Social chaos generated chaos in statistics. Both institutional factors (interdepartmental contradictions and uncoordinated actions of secret police, a huge turnover of staff of the commandant’s offices, etc.) and behavioral factors (active and passive forms of peasant resistance) influenced the accounting of exiled farmers. As a result the statistically recorded special settlements population loss in the period amounted to half a million people, or a quarter of the number of deportees, but accurate data on the mechanisms and relationships of various forms of such catastrophic deportation statistics were not fixed. This publication analyzes the causes of the information «failure» of corporate statistics.