Abstract

The Household Living Conditions Survey has been carried out annually since 1999 by the State Statistics Service of Ukraine (formerly the State Statistics Committee of Ukraine). The survey is based on generally accepted international standards and depicts social and demographic situation in Ukraine.

From 2002, items of consumer money and aggregate expenditures have been developed in line with the International Classification of Individual Consumption of Goods and Services (COICOP-HBS), recommended by Eurostat.

The State Statistics Service of Ukraine has been implementing a new system of household sample survey organization and delivery from 2004. A unified interviewer network was established to run simultaneously three household surveys: Household Living Conditions Survey, households' economic activity survey and the survey of household farming in rural areas. A new national territorial probability sampling was introduced to deliver the three sampling surveys in 2004-2008.

Geographic coverage

National, except some settlements within the territories suffered from the Chernobyl disaster.

Analysis unit

• Households,
• Individuals.

A household is a totality of persons who jointly live in the same residential facilities of part of those, satisfy all their essential needs, jointly keep the house, pool and spend all their money or portion of it. These persons may be relatives by blood, relatives by law or both, or have no kinship relations. A household may consist of one person (Law of Ukraine "On Ukraine National Census of Population," Article 1). As only 0.50% households have members with no kinship relations (0.65% total households if bachelors are excluded), the contemporary concepts "household" and "family" are very close.

Universe

Whole country, all private households. The survey does not cover collective households, foreigners temporarily living in Ukraine as well as the homeless.

Kind of data

Sample survey data [ssd]

Sampling procedure

12,977 households representing all regions of Ukraine (including 8,975 in urban areas and 4,002 in rural areas) are selected for this survey. Grossing up sample survey results to all households of Ukraine is done by the statistic weighting method.

Building a territorial sample, researchers excluded settlements located in the excluded zone (Zone 1) and unconditional (forced) resettlement zone (Zone 2) within the territories suffered from the Chernobyl disaster.

Computing the number of population subject to surveying, from the number of resident population researchers excluded institutional population - army conscripts, persons in places of confinement, residents of boarding schools and nursing homes, - and marginal population (homeless, etc).

The parent population was stratified so that the sample could adequately represent basic specifics of the administrative and territorial division and ensure more homogeneous household populations. To achieve this objective, the parent population was divided into strata against the regions of Ukraine. In each stratum three smaller substrata were formed: urban settlements (city councils) having 100,000 or more inhabitants (big cities), urban settlements (city councils) having less than 100,000 inhabitants (small towns) and all districts (except city districts), i.e. administrative districts in rural areas. Sample size was distributed among strata and substrata in proportion to their non-institutional resident population.

Detailed information about selecting primary territorial units of sampling (PTUS) and households is available in the document "Household Living Conditions Survey Methodological Comments" (p. 4-7).

Mode of data collection

Face-to-face [f2f]

Research instrument

The HLCS uses the following survey tools:

1) Main interviews

Main interview questionnaires collect general data on households, such as household composition, housing facilities, availability and use of land plots, cattle and poultry, characteristics of household members: anthropometric data, education, employment status. Interviewing of households takes place at the survey commencement stage. In addition, while interviewing, the interviewer completes a household composition check card to trace any changes during the entire survey period.

2) Observation of household expenditures and incomes

For the observation, two tools are used: - Weekly diary of current expenditures. It is completed directly by a household twice a quarter. In the diary respondents (households) record all daily expenditures in details (e.g. for purchased foodstuffs - product description, its weight and value, and place of purchase). In addition, a household puts into the diary information on consumption of products produced in private subsidiary farming or received as a gift.

Households are evenly distributed among rotation groups, who complete diaries in different week days of every quarter. Assuming that the two weeks data are intrinsic for the entire quarter, the single time period of data processing (quarter) is formed by means of multiplying diary data by ratio 6.5 (number of weeks in a quarter divided on the number of weeks when diary records were made). Inclusion of foodstuffs for long-time consumption is done based on quarterly interview data.

• Quarterly questionnaire. It is used to interview households in the first month following the reporting quarter. Researchers collect data on large and irregular expenditures, in particular those relating to the purchase of foodstuffs for long-time consumption (e.g. sacks, etc.), and also data on household incomes. Since recalling all incomes and expenditures made in a quarter is uneasy, households make records during a quarter in a special quarterly expenditures log.

The major areas for quarterly observation are the following: - structure of consumer financial expenditures for goods and services; - structure of other expenditures (material aid to other households, expenditures for private subsidiary farming, purchase of real estate, construction and major repair of housing facilities and outbuildings, accumulating savings, etc); - importance of private subsidiary farming for household welfare level (receipt and use of products from private subsidiary farming for own consumption, financial income from sales of such products, etc.); - structure of income and other financial sources of a household. We separately study the income of every individual household member (remuneration of labor, pension, scholarship, welfare, etc.) and the income in form payments to a household as a whole (subsidies for children, aid of relatives and other persons, income from - sales of real estate and property, housing and utility subsidies, use of savings, etc.).

3) Single-time topical interviews

Single-time topical interviews questionnaires are used quarterly and cover the following topics: - household expenditures for construction and repair of housing facilities and outbuilding - availability of durable goods in a household - assessment by households members of own health and accessibility of selected medical services - self-assessment by a household of adequacy of its income - household's access to Internet

In 2025, Luxembourg reached the highest score in the quality of life index in Europe, with 220 points. In second place, The Netherlands registered 211 points. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Albania and Ukraine registered the lowest quality of life across Europe with 104 and 115 points respectively. The Quality of Life Index (where a higher score indicates a higher quality of life) is an estimation of overall quality of life, calculated using an empirical formula. This formula considers various factors, including the purchasing power index, pollution index, house price-to-income ratio, cost of living index, safety index, health care index, traffic commute time index, and climate index.

Inflation was the most worrying topic worldwide as of May 2025, with ********* of the respondents choosing that option. Crime and violence, as well as poverty and social inequality, followed behind. Moreover, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the war in Gaza, *** percent of the respondents were worried about military conflict between nations. Only *** percent were worried about the COVID-19 pandemic, which dominated the world after its outbreak in 2020. Global inflation and rising prices Inflation rates have spiked substantially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. From 2020 to 2021, the worldwide inflation rate increased from *** percent to *** percent, and from 2021 to 2022, the rate increased sharply from *** percent to *** percent. While rates are predicted to fall by 2025, many are continuing to struggle with price increases on basic necessities. Poverty and global development Poverty and social inequality were the third most worrying issues for respondents. While poverty and inequality are still prominent, global poverty rates have been on a steady decline over the years. In 1994, ** percent of people in low-income countries and around one percent of people in high-income countries lived on less than 2.15 U.S. dollars per day. By 2018, this had fallen to almost ** percent of people in low-income countries and 0.6 percent in high-income countries. Moreover, fewer people globally are dying of preventable diseases, and people are living longer lives. Despite these aspects, issues such as wealth inequality have global prominence.

The UK inflation rate was 3.8 percent in August 2025, unchanged from the previous month, and the fastest rate of inflation since January 2024. Between September 2022 and March 2023, the UK experienced seven months of double-digit inflation, which peaked at 11.1 percent in October 2022. Due to this long period of high inflation, UK consumer prices have increased by over 20 percent in the last three years. As of the most recent month, prices were rising fastest in the education sector, at 7.5 percent, with prices increasing at the slowest rate in the clothing and footwear sector. The Cost of Living Crisis High inflation is one of the main factors behind the ongoing Cost of Living Crisis in the UK, which, despite subsiding somewhat in 2024, is still impacting households going into 2025. In December 2024, for example, 56 percent of UK households reported their cost of living was increasing compared with the previous month, up from 45 percent in July, but far lower than at the height of the crisis in 2022. After global energy prices spiraled that year, the UK's energy price cap increased substantially. The cap, which limits what suppliers can charge consumers, reached 3,549 British pounds per year in October 2022, compared with 1,277 pounds a year earlier. Along with soaring food costs, high-energy bills have hit UK households hard, especially lower income ones that spend more of their earnings on housing costs. As a result of these factors, UK households experienced their biggest fall in living standards in decades in 2022/23. Global inflation crisis causes rapid surge in prices The UK's high inflation, and cost of living crisis in 2022 had its origins in the COVID-19 pandemic. Following the initial waves of the virus, global supply chains struggled to meet the renewed demand for goods and services. Food and energy prices, which were already high, increased further in 2022. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 brought an end to the era of cheap gas flowing to European markets from Russia. The war also disrupted global food markets, as both Russia and Ukraine are major exporters of cereal crops. As a result of these factors, inflation surged across Europe and in other parts of the world, but typically declined in 2023, and approached more usual levels by 2024.