WHERE DOES THE PRESTON CURVE LEAD US?
World Bank and Russian Federal State Statistics Service data were used to analyze cross-country correlations between life expectancy (LE) and per capita gross domestic product (pcGDP). The resulting world trend (Preston curve) as of 2015 was compared with the trend revealed by plotting regional LE vs. pcGDP related to the major administrative areas of the Russian Federation (RF). Besides that, correlations between the same parameters related to different years, from 1960 to 2015, were examined in each of several selected countries representing the upper and lower extremes of pcGDP and LE. The same has been done with per capita health care expenditures (pcHCE) vs. LE. In all cases, the points related to RF are found signiﬁcantly lower the respective regression lines (Preston curves) built based on all points. The LE vs. pcGDP and LE vs. pcHCE plots and their extrapolations built based on data related to different years in the same country run markedly lower in the case of RF compared with other countries, including Tajikistan and the Republic of Congo. At the same time, the proportion between pcGDP and pcHCE has been shown to be the same throughout all years and all countries. Taken together, these observations suggest that the effectiveness of investing the available resources into LE, that is in human life quality, is markedly lower in Russia compared not only with Finland and Japan, where pcGDP and pcHCE are several times greater than in RF, but also with Congo and Tajikistan, where these parameters are several fold smaller, than in RF. This means that by merely increasing pcGDP and pcHCE it is impossible to increase LE in Russia above 80 years declared a national priority. Identifying the factors responsible for the above disproportions is beyond the scope of the present paper. However, the mere awareness of their existence is essential as an incentive to take special efforts aimed at the identiﬁcation and neutralization of these factors.