Institutional Innovations for the Development of the East of Russia: Effects of Implementation in the Resource Region

Abstract

The authors examined the responses of economic agents to implantation in 2013–2020 of institutional instruments of a “new model” for the development of the Far Eastern macro-region. The trend of the predominance of investments in resource projects in the total volume of investments in fixed assets in the macro-region has been confirmed. The study contains new results confirming the influence of the predominantly raw character of the region’s economy on the transformation of institutions, expressed through: modification of institutional instruments for the development of the region and the formation of a multiplicity of preferential regimes in the interests of large resourcebased companies; the emergence of negative institutional externalities for the regional economy in the implementation of selected institutional instruments in the resourcebased industries. We ranged the Far Eastern and several Siberian regions according to the degree of resource dependence with the estimation of the selected indicators for the natural resource sector as a whole (including the extraction of mineral, forest and waterbiological resources), which corresponds to the economic specialization of the macroregion. We have revealed that the result of the implementation of the “new model” of development was an increase in resource dependence in the economy of the Far Eastern macro-region in the studied period. The obtained estimates demonstrate the contradiction between the goals, institutional instruments and the first results of the implementation of the “new model” of development of the Far East. The study allows to gain new knowledge at the intersection of certain theoretical and applied scientific directions: assessing the effectiveness of state regional policy; the role of natural resources in economic development; institutional design