• human development index
• oil dependence
• oil price volatility
• Russian economy
• standard of living

Nowadays there is a lot of discussions about raw material dependence of the Russian economy, especially oil dependence. The consequence of this is a deterioration in the standard of living of the population with a decline in crude oil prices on the global market. And maintaining and improving living standards amid steadily declining oil prices in recent years is a very difficult task for such large oil-exporting countries as Russia. Therefore, in this paper, we have developed an econometric model to examine the influence of 2 factors on the human development index: crude oil prices and incarceration rates. Due to the large area of the research object (the area of the Russian Federation is 17.1 million square kilometers), we carried out an analysis at the country level and at the level of federal districts. To determine the robustness of the model we used several tests from classical assumptions. For the analysis, data were used for the period 1999-2017.