Home – Home – Jornals – Region: Economics and Sociology 2018 number 1

The article analyzes an institutional structure for managing the spatial development of a Russian federal subject; specifically it examines functions, powers, schemes, and procedures related to the practices of regional authorities from the perspective of ensuring unity and interconnection between the regional and municipal levels of administration. We study contemporary problems of managing regional socio-economic development against the background of a new state and municipal governance system in the works. The article proposes methodological approaches to justifying the design concepts for the institutional system of regional governance that provides integrated socio-economic development of regions. We consider issues in executing the authorities’ powers to develop territories in an integrated fashion; the institutional problems of land matters and integrated development of rural areas; issues in managing the development of entrepreneurship and regional infrastructure; as well as the role of an innovation system in modeling an integrated approach to territory development. We show some features of the design, structure, and content of the institutional system for managing regional socio-economic development. We offer recommendations on how to establish powers, specific rights, duties, and functions of the institutional structures for regional governance, to devise a system of regional regulatory documents ensuring improved governance reliability and quality, to substantiate regulators that provide economic interest in the sphere where regional government bodies interact with business structures, to form an essential regional and municipal statistics database, to create an infrastructure which would assist in transiting to an effective institutional governance system with the help of new information technologies.

The research justifies principles and a methodology of the multidimensional structuring of institutional maintenance of region’s social and economic development as a federal subject. It generalizes problems and trends of modern development affecting the structure of institutional maintenance. We compose a new approach to institutional maintenance ordering, which proves multidimensional characteristics of an institutional system across space and time. The article marks out elements of institutional maintenance (aims, institutions, mechanisms, and evaluations of results) and defines related concepts. Structuring principles are developed that consider management levels, territorial and sectoral aspects of the economy, a combination of strategic and tactical decisions, elements of a regional system, etc. The research methodology relies on a complex of approaches: subject-functional, system, organizational, strategic, and interdisciplinary. We design parameters for a multidimensional structural model of region’s institutional system and examine their interrelations. The article contains recommendations on how to use this model to create an information retrieval system.

The article uses the methods of the endogenous growth theory to study the relationship between financial development and economic dynamics at the national and subnational levels. It identifies the regularities in the dependence of the parameters values for the regional growth models on the class of regions. We categorize the regions according to how developed the level of banking intermediation is. The regions are grouped by the composite banking services density index (following the methodology by the Bank of Russia). Having analyzed the panel data on 75 regions of the Russian Federation between 2002 and 2014, we found evidence in favor of greater elasticity of regional GDP on the banking intermediation indicators in the groups of regions with the medium level of financial development. Thus, we do not reject a hypothesis for the non-monotonic relation between finance and growth among different groups of Russian regions. For regional studies in Russia focused on the issue of economic development factors, this means a need to increase attention to the development of nonpublic sectors of the regional financial systems. Another consequence is that the search for convergence mechanisms should be oriented towards the institutions providing financial development.

The article exposes the results of monitoring the socio-economic development of Altai Krai under economic instability. We reveal development peculiarities of a typical agro-industrial region. Along with the dynamics characteristics of the real economy, we consider movements in the region’s investment sphere, changes in the living standard of the population, the labor market condition, etc. The conclusion drawn is that the economy of the region under structural crisis has turned out to be more adapted as compared to an «average Russian» region, with less a pronounced reaction to the deteriorating external economic environment. Altai Krai is characterized by lagging crisis manifestation combined with a more rapid economic recovery. As a special feature of the region’s development, we also note a comparatively badly adapted labor market and too-slowly-growing standard of living indicators to overcome the historical development gap with the rest of Russia.

The authors evaluate the impact of human capital on economic dynamics in Russian regions against significant shifts in the educational structure of the employed population, characterized by a dominant share of people with higher education in most regions. The main hypothesis of the study states that only specific groups of regions could obtain real benefits from a significant increase in the share of employed with higher education. The results of estimation of panel regressions with fixed effects demonstrate that human capital accumulation somewhat increases the rates of economic growth in regions with industrial specialization, high scientific potential, and those located in the western part of Russia. The human capital has no significant effect on economic growth in regions with specialization in services and mining. An increase in the share of employed with higher education increases growth rates in underdeveloped and agricultural regions with decreasing return to scale. The low share of the gainfully employed population with basic vocational education constrains growth in regions specializing in industrial production and services. At the same time, the human capital concentrated in the research and development sector has no significant effect on growth even in the regions with high scientific potential due to the «disconnected» character of regional innovation systems and the low level of demand for innovations from the majority of Russian industrial enterprises.

The article analyzes the changes in the scale and structure of real and potential rural youth migration and the impact they suffer from the key regulators in Altai Krai since the early 2000s. The analysis is carried out by using statistics, results of quantitative and qualitative surveys among ordinary citizens and experts, government policy documents, and media materials. We describe the model of rural youth migratory flows regarding pendulum and seasonal migration and provide a quantitative estimation for migration magnitudes. The article uncovers an increasing influence of family and kin networks as a catalyst for youth migration to cities and a growing role of rural business as its inhibitor. We identify how effectively or poorly the state policy impacts the socio-economic development of the region’s rural areas, the social situation of rural youth and, as a result, reducing migration. We propose state policy trends aimed at improving the social status of rural youth and decreasing their migration rate.

The article describes strategies for adaptation to the crisis conditions of 2014-2015 performed by urban and rural residents of Siberia, who have experience in overcoming earlier crises. We use the data collected from semi-formalized interviews to analyze people’s ways of adapting to the crisis, as well as conceptions about how their actions during previous crises hindered or helped to adapt to the crisis today. We design a typology of adaptation strategies that includes ones for minimizing risks, maximizing benefits, «temporary conservation» and combined strategies. The conclusion is drawn that the boundaries of crises are relatively blurred, which indicates that individuals «hit» crises unequally. Moreover, we show that crisis events, interpreted against individual and family biographies, are described as «personal crises» not always tied to formal crisis years in Russia, but rooted in regionally specific contexts and related to significant biographical developments. Both groups of urban and rural residents invent their own rules and anti-crisis measures; they rethink the experience of overcoming previous crises in the context of events that are relevant today.

The article analyzes features of how industrial elites visualize those problems (collisions) of manufacturing enterprises which are objectively connected with technological innovations: available resources including human capital, social barriers and catalyst factors for innovation, technological innovation networks, etc. As an information base for research, we use an expert sociological survey held among chief executives of manufacturing enterprises in Novosibirsk. We draw several conclusions. The industrial policy pursued by the Russian federal government deeply frustrates experts in terms of innovative development challenges. Technological innovation networks at enterprises under study are formed de facto within a compressed local socio-economic space, and infringed at that, since the years of market reform saw destructive deindustrialization processes which prompted the degeneration of the regional and interregional innovation networks that had developed in the Soviet era, the system of former technological interactions collapsed and disintegrated whereas new networks and interactions shape up slowly and hesitantly. The subject of human capital in industry, when put within a dynamically changing technological and innovative reality, comes out as ambiguous: on the one hand, it is claimed that employees are highly proficient; on the other hand, it is recognized that the innovative capacity is not yet unlocked for objective reasons. Inflamed tensions among key agents in the field of technological innovation (manufacturing enterprises and federal agencies) create additional obstructions for Russia to the path of innovative development, so they must be deescalated.

The article explores the relationship between the sizes of the shadow economy and agriculture, and verifies the statement that the growing agricultural share in GDP leads to an increase in the shadow economy. We present the results of testing the statistical interrelation between the size of the shadow economy in Russian regions and the indicators reflecting the size of agriculture (distribution of the rural and urban population over the total population, the share of agricultural production in the GRP). The research method involves analyzing the approximation curves constructed from scatter plots using the urban population ratio and the logarithm of the shadow sector indicators. We incorporate the Rosstat data and authors’ calculations measuring the size of the shadow economy in Russian regions for 2002-2013. The article confirms a hypothesis that there is a direct relationship between the size of the shadow sector and the share of agriculture in the economy. In regions, the size of the shadow economy is notably interrelated with the proportion of the rural population and moderately interrelated with the share of agriculture, hunting, and forestry in GRP. We observe gradually increasing informal employment in non-agricultural activities. The conclusion is as follows: further rural-urban migration and urban population growth will increase the size of the shadow economy in the least urbanized regions and decrease it in semi-urbanized regions.

The article explores the issues of assessing the prospects of a transport corridor along the Asia-Europe route through Mongolia as an addition to various direct links between China and Russia. The results of model experiments with fuzzy sets show that transit through Mongolia’s territory will only intensify providing that there is an active state policy to regulate rail and road transport fares and that a logistics center will be built in Ulaanbaatar.

The article analyzes eco-economic processes taking place in the Russian federal subjects of the Baikal region. We assess eco-intensity according to a system of indicators that characterize the specific values of the negative environmental impact per unit ofeconomic result. The article shows that the specific negative impact on the environment with respect to different types of pollutants may vary rather significantly across regions; therefore, it is hardly advisable to develop environmental policy measures based on consolidated figures, and it is essential to find more subtle tools of eco-economic regulation. We recognize growing eco-intensity in the international commerce for the «Production and distribution of electricity, gas, and water» across all the three federal subjects of the Baikal region. It indicates that this sector has not seen practically any environmental advancements for almost 9 years, despite the post-2000 reforms in the power economy and housing services, and that it should still be in focus of eco-economic policy. The most important tasks in Baikal region development are to draft measures that would facilitate transitioning to the best available technologies and to create new green and high-tech economic sectors with minimal negative impact on the environment.

In a dynamically changing situation with the use of renewables in regional economy, a need arises to research the current state of this process and the developing tendencies. The article presents the main results of the research. We reveal prerequisites for an increase in renewable power generation capacities, show technologic innovations and restrictions to the use of certain renewables in various territories of the Siberian Federal District. The article gives results of the analysis of the current state and construction plans of power stations based on renewable power sources in district regions. In the medium term, water and sun are the largest power sources in scale in Siberia.

The article studies complex investment plans to modernize monotowns in Kemerovo Oblast and analyzes financing of pilot diversification projects. We develop a toolkit for analyzing and assessing the efficiency of monotowns’ diversification. Using 21 municipal formations in the region as an example, we discover a correlation between diversification indices. The article plots a matrix of diversification efficiency upon which the municipal formations are grouped. We design an autoregressive efficiency model with evidence from Berezovsky monotown.