Home – Home – Jornals – Geography and Natural Resources 2025 number 1

The relevance of the study is due to the presence of a number of regions significantly lagging behind in development in the peripheral border zone of Russia, in particular, the Republic of Tyva. The main reason for the economic lag of Tyva is a priori considered to be the lack of rail communication and the relative geographical remoteness from the major economic centers of the country. It is assumed that the creation of a new branch of rail communication will a priori lead to an increase in economic activity in all sectors of the regional economy. But, on the one hand, the problems of industries and economic entities of the region can be associated with a greater share of the influence of other factors than transport restrictions and costs. On the other hand, the railway is not only the roadway and rolling stock itself, but also, to no lesser extent, issues of logistics, infrastructure and economic efficiency of the carrier itself. With a significant imbalance in the volumes of imported and exported cargo in the case of a dead-end railway line, the issue of transportation economics can be of critical importance. The hypothesis of the study is the absence of strictly determined relationships between the volumetric characteristics of the regional economy in comparable (specific) values and the level of provision with transport infrastructure facilities. In order to disclose this issue, the role of transport infrastructure as a tool for economic growth, as well as its key parameters that affect the growth, was studied. A cluster analysis was conducted based on the similarity of volumetric and structural indicators of the regional economies in the context of provision with transport infrastructure facilities. In view of the uneven settlement of the country’s residents and the corresponding objective territorial contrasts between the regions, in order to ensure comparability, the analysis of the provision of Russian subjects with transport infrastructure was carried out relative not to a unit of area, as is traditionally accepted, but to the population number of the subjects. According to the authors, this makes more economic sense. Using multivariate factor analysis, the corresponding statistical relationships between the indicators were identified and interpreted. Having established the obvious connection between the possibility of implementing individual economic projects, as well as the presence and condition of certain technologically linked types of transport infrastructure, it follows that the emergence of new types of transport communications or the improvement of the condition of the existing infrastructure does not guarantee an automatic improvement of the economic situation in the region and may depend more on the characteristics of the internal and external economic situation.