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The EU has set out its vision for Europe's social market economy in the Europe 2020 strategy, which aims at confronting our structural weaknesses through progress in smart specialization. In line with the Guide to Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialization, this paper aims to identify key directions of sustainable innovative development of Russian resource regions and determine their readiness for smart specialization. Relying on clustering methodological approaches, this study has revealed: 1) economically developed resource regions, ready for smart specialization by attracting private sector investment; 2) resource regions ready for smart specialization using only public-private partnership, 3) enclave resource regions that initially require significant government support to enhance their investment attractiveness for private sector participation. The use of public-private partnerships and other forms of state support is a priority task at the initial stage, while regions with weak economic structure should receive support from the state until they become attractive to active private capital investing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small industrial towns of the Ural region (about 200 in number) are mainly onecompany towns, their history dating back about 300 years. Most of them are now experiencing economic decline because raw materials have already been exhausted, and agglomeration processes intensify the outflow of population. However, they constitute a unique settlement system, well thought-out and adjusted to the climatic conditions, and retain lifestyle, system of values and mentality aimed at the active interaction between man and nature, which implies the minimization of human impact thereon. The roots of this tradition can be traced in the culture of metallurgical proto-towns of the South Urals in the second millennium B.C. Its decline begins in the middle of the 19th century with the advent of large capitalist production aimed at quantitative indicators, and continues with the modernization processes of socialist Russia. The article aims to prove that the major urban planning and architectural indicators of small industrial towns of the Urals comply with the modern criteria for sustainable development. Taking historical facts, photographic evidence data, and materials from the Urals folklore (fairy tales by Pavel Bazhov) as a basis, the author shows the need to study and maintain the historical experience in urban planning and architecture, and compares this experience with that of a number of other old industrial regions. These studies may help to define economic and sociocultural "development points" of the Ural region as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes the indicative system of sustainable development of the region that contains thirty indicators grouped into ten projections (macroeconomic stability, industrial development, food development, energy development, financial sustainability, personnel development, innovative development, social development, environmental development and economic development). Each of the projections has three indicators. We have chosen threshold value for each indicator. The choice of threshold value was made from various considerations (in accordance with the national thresholds, international comparisons, expert opinions, etc.). When selecting a system of indicators we used the following considerations: data visibility (official websites of the Federal Service of State Statistics, the Ministry of Finance, the Regional Development Ministry, the Central Bank, etc.), the single period for the collection the information is one year, a limited number of indicators. The developed system of indicators will allow carrying out a complete analysis of the sustainable development of regions. The results of studies based on the analysis of strengths and weaknesses and comparative correlations can be used to develop specific recommendations for improving the level of sustainable development of the regions of different countries. A radar plot representing the level of sustainable development of the Nizhny Novgorod region is shown as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The model of human activity in spheres of vital activity is presented. The social, industrial and ecological spheres of human activity in the Arctic micro-territory were chosen. The model in the formalized form is a system of six econometric equations. As the Arctic micro-territory, the Nenets region of the Russian Federation was chosen. Each sphere of human activity is estimated by indicators. The human development potential is assessed by the human development index. The notion of sustainable development in the Arctic micro-territory according to the spheres of human activity is given. With sustainable development, the change in the indices of various spheres of human activity leads to the expansion of the potential of human development. Each equation of the system of six equations is represented by an ADL- model. The ADL-model shows the dependence of the endogenous indicator of human activity on current and previous values of the influence of the structure of time series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Balanced regional structure of the country is one of the most important factors of the sustainable economic growth. Particularly it concerns innovation development. More generally, not only the structure itself does matter but also its stability. This issue becomes especially significant when political and economic environment of the country is complicated enough. It is vital for the Russian Federation to keep the sustainability, so the analysis of the regional structure evolution could be helpful in forming the efficient policy of innovation development for the country as a whole and for its regions. Russia consists of 85 regions; it is not too much for statistical modelling, so the analysis in high dimensional space looks quite artificial. That is why we can hardly use more than one indicator on each main aspect of innovation development. Parametric approach is the most efficient way of the modelling when the conditions for them are satisfied, and we specify the model as a mixture of lognormal distributions and find the maximum likelihood estimates of its parameters. The estimates are helpful for either traditional crisp clustering or soft classifying of the regions in the space of innovation activity indicators. To analyse the dynamic of the structure we trace its general parameters and changes in the groups of regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public Private Partnership is very powerful tool for realization of infrastructure projects that are extremely important for sustainable development of the country, especially, in unstable economic situation while the private companies are not willing to take completely all investment risks. As it is known, the Russian economy is greatly weakened in recent years. According to Russian Business Consulting Service its growth rate in 2017 will be 2 times lower than in developed countries. At the moment Russia faced with the economic sanctions and lost the cooperation with the European countries and the United States that makes the country more attentively treat to the development of Public Private Partnership. Firstly, Public Private Partnership programs could solve the problem of lack of budget funding for the large number of socially significant projects. Secondly, they allow creation of new working places that is crucial on the background of optimizations and reductions in the commercial sector. Moreover, they could support local private business involved in these projects to reduce the outflow of capital from the country, offering profitable investment opportunities. And, finally, Public Private Partnership programs improve the socio-political and economic situation in the country by creating necessary new infrastructure. Although discussions of the advantages of Public Private Partnership are becoming more commonplace in business, academic and government circles, Public Private Partnership still develops slowly in Russia. The purpose of this article is to gain in depth understanding of exactly what role Public Private Partnership plays in the sustainable development of Russian economy and what problems this tool faces with in Russia. In order to more seriously focus on the topic the authors proved that it is possible to consider Public Private Partnership as a new efficient combination of the market competition as a tool to seek for efficiency and of the State regulation as a tool to build the institutional background. Furthermore, based on the statistics and official materials the main peculiarities of Public Private Partnership in Russia were analyzed. The authors underline the barriers for the implementation of this tool and identify the possible areas of development of Public Private Partnership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of the uncertainty of the environment on the financial and economic sustainability of Russian enterprises is examined in the article. The analysis of the dynamics of the basic indicators of activity of Russian enterprises and identify of the relationships between the waves of the global economic crisis and these parameters allowed authors to predict the main trends of development of the Russian economy. On the basis of the analysis of trends of indicators of functioning of enterprises, the problems caused by fluctuations in the external environment were formulated from the point of view of stability of the enterprise. In order to control the stability of the economic entity, the authors suggest grading the perturbing factors affecting on the economy of the enterprise, depending on the level of their occurrence: micro, mini, meso and macro. Additionally, the necessity of development and application of probabilistic and statistical models in the analysis of financial and economic stability of Russian enterprises, which is especially important during the global economic crisis, is justified in the article. The analysis and suggested methodical approaches to increase of stability of Russian enterprises are the basis for stable sustainable economic growth, as individual subjects of the economy of the country and the economy as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]