Home – Home – Jornals – Region: Economics and Sociology 2026 number 3

The article is against the stagnant dogmatism that has been dominating us for many years and distorting our understanding of reality, preventing us from making the right decisions. One of the dogmas of regional development is taken as an example - the imperative of state-centralized leveling of inter-regional inequality. The author discusses the scientific validity and practical expediency of the overdue revision of established views on the essence and sources of interregional inequality, as well as on the absolute necessity and ways to equalize it within the framework of regional development policy in the federal market context of modern Russia. The idea of changing this paradigm is based on the long-term experience of unsuccessful and insufficiently effective state centralized efforts to reduce inter-regional inequality, counteract the reproduction of existing and the emergence of new inter-regional imbalances. The facts speak about the chronic crisis of the equalization system. The alternative put forward by the author is a new attitude towards inequality as a fundamental phenomenon of objectively uneven regional development, which, contrary to stereotypical views, has by no means purely negative consequences, but also serves as an important (especially for the conditions and tasks of the post-Soviet transition from “unitarianism and socialism to federalism and the market") constructive factor in the actual reorganization of space. Provided that the focus is placed on the natural course and self-development of relevant processes and phenomena - aspects that are often underestimated by a paternalistic state. The contradictory role of the state itself is also noted: while declaring the goal of combating inequality and implementing policies to that end, it simultaneously supports and exacerbates this phenomenon through its own decisions.