State Incentivizing of Investment Activity in the Resource Region: Far East of Russia Variant

• Main Author: Natalia Valentinovna Lomakina
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Economic Research Institute of the Far East Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences 2021-02-01
• Series: Prostranstvennaâ Èkonomika
• Subjects: state regional policy; preferential regimes; incentivizing investment activity; resource region; far eastern macro region
• Online Access: http://www.spatial-economics.com/images/spatial-econimics/2020_4/SE.2020.4.068-090.Lomakina.pdf

The authors studied the actual policies and emerging effects of state incentivizing of investment activity instruments under the ‘new model’ of development for the Far East of Russia. There were shown the specifics of localizing investments in the resource region in shape of preferential regimes of Territories of Advanced Social and Economic Development (TAD or ASEZ Advanced Special Economic Zones) and also extraterritorial preferences as direct subsidies from the federal budget to infrastructure projects of strategically important investment projects and regional investment projects. The effects of these instruments employed in the Far Eastern Federal District in 2014–2020 demonstrate that the package of state measures formed for attracting investments and its separate elements (royalty benefits, the criterion of maximum attraction of private investments for every rouble of budget ones, etc.) have promoted investments mainly in extraction of minerals in the total surveyed range of support instruments. The outcome of these preferences was further growth of resource-based industries in the Far East economy structure (which to a certain extent predetermines the perspective economy structure of the macro region). The analysis of the rate of accumulation (a share of investments in the regional Gross Domestic Product) as a factor of economic growth showed that the majority of Far Eastern regions (except the mono-mineral Sakhalinskaya and Magadanskaya oblasts and the Chukotsky Autonomous Okrug) do not reassert the role of resource-based industries as key drivers for their economic growth which would have justified state incentives for extraction of mineral resources in particular. Certain modifications have been revealed in the very instruments of state incentives under the ‘new model’ of development in the Far East of Russia among which is a blurring of border lines between preferential territories to legitimize incentivizing of mineral companies; a changed (reduced) role of regional authorities in implementation of different instruments; forming ‘multi-layer’ preferences in the interest of mineral companies. It was demonstrated that in the surveyed contour of key actors interacting in the process of implementing different instruments of a ‘new model’ for development of the Far East of Russia (federal and regional administration, businesses) with greater vividness comes to the fore a tendency for shaping key outcomes of preferences in mineral companies