Home – Home – Jornals – Region: Economics and Sociology 2009 number 2

The paper describes the recent studies made by the IEIE SB RAS concerning the development of strategic socio-economic plans for Siberia. The paper focuses on the latest version of the strategy having been developed since the end of 2008, and the reasons why it needs to be renewed. The authors formulate the development objectives and tasks for the next 20-25 years, the strategic priorities, and factors which may favour and impede the achievement of these objectives. The paper also analyses the primary stages of the current financial and economic crisis, suggests the hypotheses of how the crisis would continue and what impact it would have on the development in Siberia.

The paper evaluates the structural shifts occurring under the influence of high prices for hydrocarbon materials and taking place in the Khanty-Mansisk-Yugra and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Districts. It was shown how a two-sector model of these regional economies has shaped under the high oil and gas prices. The paper considers what kind of risks may threaten such two-sector economy.

The paper presents his regional informational socio-economic monitoring system and an analytic system to trace the dynamics of regional development. There are also presented the basic goals of how IT-technologies would be applied to the regional socio-economic monitoring and the economic analysis. The author developed a model and a relative software-based informational management system that would provide the higher efficiency of decisions made by the top regional authorities.

The paper analyses the issues of how regional and local budgets can interplay to generate a financial base for local authorities. The author evaluates the structures of local budgets and the indices calculated for local budgets dissimilarity before and after transfers from regional budgets; offers a technique of how to identify which area mostly influence on the dissimilarity indices calculated after transfers from superior budgets; analyzes how grant transfers and local revenues correlate; and estimates a marginal effect of increased taxes received by local budgets.

The paper substantiates the priorities and mechanisms of regional social policy; presents the forecasting socio-economic stratification of Siberian population according different variants of the development in Siberia; evaluates the negative impacts of the financial crisis; and recommends the necessary measures to prevent social collapse.

The paper considers the initial demographic situation of Siberia in the latest decade as well as the negative trends of prolonged character. Assuming an innovation scenario of the economic development in Siberia, the author describes a future demographic situation applying estimations of size and sex-age structure of the population in future. The author also offers the mechanism of demographic policy considered as a set of managerial, informational and legal measures, and describes the stages of the policy.

The paper presents a forecast of the natural gas production and processing in the Eastern Siberia and Far East; calculates the development parameters in the oil processing and petrochemical sectors according to the plans and forecasts for oil industry; identifies the gas deliveries routes; assesses the fiscal and commercial effectiveness of investments; and formulates and validates the conditions due to which Russia would entry into new outer markets.

The author applies a technique of cross-regression analysis to the energy balances of Russian regions to assess the long-term energy demand elasticity, and concludes that most of producing sectors of the economy have a high long-term elasticity of energy demand and electric capacity. The energy demand elasticity is also assessed in relation to the level of business activity in such sectors. The high values of this indicator show the increasing electrification of industries and application of more energy.

The paper show what features of global warming can be observed in the Russian Arctic, and summarize the socio-economic consequences and risks of climate changes expecting in the Arctic region in the early XXI century.

The paper describes basic features of the economic crisis and what impacts the crisis has upon municipalities. To overcome the crisis, the transition to the new domestic economy based on principles of thrift, rational consumption,   new economic thinking, introduction of innovations and higher efficiency of labor is considered inevitable. The authors show what local governments should undertake now to ensure economic growth in the post-crisis time.

The paper considers the contemporary processes of human migration from the Kyrgyz Republic to Russia and the socio-economic consequences for these countries. As for the Kyrgyz Republic, the paper shows the negative and positive social and political consequences of the Russian-speaking people out-migration. The conclusion is that the labor migration, especially that of a titular ethnic group, is considered advantageous for both the Kyrgyz Republic and the Russian regions accepting immigrants for lack of labor resources.