Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>This study compares the gross remuneration of a senior researcher across the ten most developed countries—ranked by the United Nations Development Programme's 2025 Human Development Index and treated here as an aspirational benchmark aligned with Ukraine's European integration—and Ukraine, and evaluates whether that remuneration is sufficient for a comfortable standard of living, an issue that bears directly on researcher retention amid substantial wartime emigration. Gross annual salaries were obtained from salary aggregators and, for Ukraine, from salary reports in the Ukrainian press and first-person accounts by researchers. Living costs were approximated using a consistent single-adult cost-of-living benchmark, and the ratio of gross pay to annual living cost served as a purchasing-power-sensitive indicator. In the developed comparators the salary covers approximately 2.4 to 3.7 times a single adult's annual living cost. In Ukraine the ratio is about 1.3 for broader-market research roles and about 0.4 for the academic rank of senior researcher. For a senior researcher based in Zaporizhzhia, whose academic salary is close to a third of the local average net wage, the base salary appears insufficient for a comfortable single-person standard of living in 2026. Moreover, because the academic salary is adjusted only periodically rather than indexed continuously to prices, its real value is eroded by consumer-price inflation between adjustments, which the National Bank of Ukraine projects to approach 10% for 2026, so that the shortfall tends to widen over the year. The findings are indicative, given reliance on self-reported and crowdsourced data, and are discussed with reference to financial and non-financial motivation and the wartime context.</p>