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The article examines financial hardship (FH) that appears as one of the essential socio-economic-financial categories reflecting a financial burden on society and therefore having a significant impact on the social and economic development of the country. The purpose of this article is to propose and approve a methodology for the complex quantitative assessment of financial difficulty, which allows comparing countries one another. The novelty of the conducted research is manifested by the formed financial hardship adequately exposing a system of indicators and suggesting the transformation of incomparable indicators into the comparable ones. The paper proposes a methodology for the integrated assessment of financial hardship based on multi-criteria methods, which contributes to solving the problems of the social sustainability and economic development of the countries employing different research methods. The proposed methodology provides a possibility of moving to a higher level of research comparing the countries as a whole, in line to the current status of FH. The actual benefits of the carried out research arise from the opportunity to envisage targeted measures for increasing social sustainability subject to the specific situation of the financial hardship of the countries thus removing the burdens of further economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]