Vladimir Klimanov (p), Ksenia Budaeva

The most important feature of regional development in Russia is the fact that a value of regional disparities is huge and considerably higher than not only in developed countries but also in EU between countries. Moreover, such issues of territorial organization of economy as an uneven distribution of natural resources, low population density, sparsity of the cities, and the increased costs of overcoming long distances lead to the widening of the gap between regions.
In Russia, regional strategy of economic and social development as a tool of regional policy is the main document of strategic planning system at sub-national level. It determines priorities, goals and objectives of territory development.
The research reflects the current situation and trends in the field of regional strategizing. The strategies’ contents for their compliance with the formulated criteria in 2007 and 2015 were studied. We used our own methodology based on qualitative and quantitative documentary analysis. Regional strategies and forecasts as normative legal acts were reviewed. Several basic elements of regional strategies have been chosen: objectives, analysis of economic and social development, choice of strategic alternatives, its economic relations with neighboring regions, analysis of regional economy sectors, SWOT of a region, financial resources for strategy realization. Regional forecasts were studied by the presence of scenarios.
There is a positive progressive development of strategizing in the contemporary Russia. Over the past decade, the number of regional strategies has increased significantly. Their contents have been improved. In all documents, there is an analysis of economic and social situation including strengths and weaknesses of development, geographical and historical features. The majority of documents contains analysis of region's economic relations with other regions. However, general vectors of regional interaction are only given without mechanisms for its implementation. The analysis allows highlighting a few strategies, which reflect unique characteristics of a particular territory.
There is a gap in terms of substantial instructions for regional strategies’ contents. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt a common methodology of strategizing at the federal level. The concept should not contain formalized requirements for documents, it is necessary to fix the basic requirements for the strategies’ contents and to improve a quality of strategizing and evaluation of achievement degree of planned development objectives.

Elena Goosen, Kirill Sablin (p), Sergey Nikitenko

At the beginning of the XXI century, the success or failure of country economic development is largely defined by the capacity of its regions to provide economic growth. The basic challenges for countries development are arisen on the regional level and the main threat is to build resilience on the basis of balance search between place-based approach and international embeddedness. The most appropriate theoretical concept that allows accepting challenges is quadruple helix model as the element of smart specialization concept. The EU experience shows that local communities play a great role to increase resilience to accept challenges. They define the regions development prospects along with businesses, local authorities and public R&D organizations. Unlike the EU, there is a high level of the Russian regions socio-economic and innovative development differentiation as well as «enclave» character of Russian «resource-type» regions and there is no stable civil society. One can say about the institutions and local communities’ passiveness and Russian regions «fragility».
The main challenges for the Russian regions are «bad» international embeddedness and the lack of demand for place-based approach implementation. This is due to the «resource-type» development that formed by the Russian multinational corporations integrated into the international chains of added value producing and by rent-seeking local authorities. All this defines domestic markets weakness, the absence of cohesion between regions and resources concentration by the federal center with super centralization of regions control.
It seems that place-based approach implementation is the clear way out of this situation with the help of privatization and decentralization of regions control. Nevertheless, the analysis shows that such decision does not build resilient regions and forms "traps". Multinational corporations privatization in the conditions of unformed domestic markets leads to a corporations’ reconfiguration and the struggle for the redistribution of resources. Decentralization of regions control leads to the danger of «reexit». To build resilient regions in Russia is to find subjects that can create domestic markets and cohesion between regions.
We elaborated «resource-type» regions classification and identified local communities those are able to create cohesion and to formulate adequate aims for place-based approach implementation. These local communities are non-profit organizations, expert and scientific communities and expert communities under local authorities. Non-profit organizations of businesses are the most motivated to overcome the «fragility» of regional development and initiate place-based approach implementation.
The experience of Mechanical Engineers Association of Kuzbass to form regional policy is highlighted in the paper.

Svetlana Ageeva (p), Anna Mishura

We examine the regional distribution of Russian banks and bank branches in 2000-2016 to show that the institutional features of Russian regions along with the economic factors such as a size and the structure of the regional economy and the population are important factors for location of regional banks. The conclusion of our study is that regional specifics related to institutional factors (i.e. a republican status, significant share of non-Russian population, federal district center status, and diversity of active political forces) impact on the number of regional banks, multi-branch banking, and their location. We present the quantitative evaluations of how these factors impact on the number of regional banks and multi-branch Moscow banks.

Eva Dettmann (p), Antje Weyh, Mirko Titze

The aim of the paper is to assess employment effects of investment subsidies in one of the most strongly subsidized German Federal States, Saxony Anhalt. We analyze employment effects for the funding period 2007-2013. Detailed treatment information enable us to differentiate between short and mid-term employment effects. We estimate the treatment effect for the treated firms as a whole as well as heterogeneous effects depending on characteristics of the firms and the economic environment as well as timing of the treatment. Our data base combines treatment, employment and regional information from three different sources. We modify the standard nonparametric matching and difference in difference approach by introducing flexible durations for outcome differences and a combined statistical distance function for matching instead of the common Propensity score. In the matching process, we explicitly consider the point of time a firm is compared to his ‘statistical twin’ to exclude a potential ‘time bias’ resulting from matching of partners at different points of time.
The results suggest that GRW investment subsidies have a positive influence on the employment development both in short and medium run. The difference amounts to about 3.5 full-time equivalents (FTE) in the short and about 6.5 FTEs in medium run. We also observe considerable effect heterogeneity. Depending on e.g. the economic sector, the short-term effect ranges from -0.36 to 8.13 FTEs. In the medium run, we observe employment effects of e.g. 12.1 FTEs and 4.5 FTEs depending on whether the firm is located in an urbanised or rural area. Also the timing of treatment influences the height of the effect.