A Methodological Approach to the Composite Assessment of Ukraine’s Social Security Under War Conditions
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Full-scale war has altered the circumstances in which social security is provided in Ukraine. Its new determinants include physical protection, the continuity of essential services, the state’s ability to resume its functions following attacks, and the proportion of territory under its control. Meanwhile, official statistics have become less reliable. The Ukrainian Social Security Index (USSI), which was developed here, combines a weighted, additive core of critical security, economic security, social stability, and agroclimatic conditions, as well as two multiplicative factors: institutional resilience and territorial control. It is applied to Ukraine for the period 2019–2026, with a provisional estimate for 2026. Wartime losses act as multipliers and the agroclimatic component is computed using remote sensing data. The mean index declines from 0.625 between 2019 and 2021 to 0.313 between 2022 and 2026, representing a 50.0 per cent decrease. This trend is consistent across all tested aggregation schemes, with a ±0.05 shift in the expert-assigned inputs maintaining the decline within the range of 48.5–51.6 per cent. In a conditional variance decomposition for 2026, the resilience factor has a total-order sensitivity index of 87.0 per cent under the adopted uncertainty scheme, and it is also the quantity that is least supported by primary data. After controlling for a linear time trend, drought exposure was found to be negatively associated with cereal yield (partial r = −0.861; p = 0.0003; n = 13), which supports the content of the agroclimatic component. Although aggregation is fully reproducible, the scoring of the three components relies on expert judgement. Furthermore, the index as a whole has not been validated against an external criterion.
Author: Andrii Varvus
Language: English
Topic: Economic Issues in Ukraine
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7223909050