MODERN YOUTH EDUCATION FOR SOCIAL AND ECNDOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE ARCTIC.

Background: Quite promising in terms of economics and geopolitics, projects of social and eco-nomic development of the Arctic that are currently underway need skilled and well-trained young person-nel. Digitization of the economy, especially important for of the Arctic, has led to the necessity of forming new competencies in the process of modern youth education. With regard to this, studies aimed at exploring the opportunities of new educational technologies become particularly relevant. Purpose: The objective of the paper is to present the authors' viewpoint on modern youth education which underlies social and economic development of the Arctic. Design/methodology/approach: The reliability and validity of the research findings are achieved by the integrated use of general scientific and particular methods of inquiry in their interrelation and interdependence. The methodological framework of the research is the set of general scientific inquiry methods: comparative analysis and synthesis, deduction and induction, and the systemic and synergetic approach. Findings: Within the research, principal factors predetermining the way digitization unfolds for social and economic development of the Arctic areas have been outlined; Russia has been found to rank worst among the Arctic countries in digital competitiveness; for the first time in the world practice, the effect of gigonomy as a special social and economic model on the development of digital society in the Arctic has been identified; the promising outlook of dissemination of online education has been demon-strated, with specific conditions of the Arctic taken into account; bottlenecks in implementation of digital projects in the Arctic, in the sphere of education included, have been analyzed and summed up. Conclusions: The paper can be of interest for a broad range of researchers, first of all, for those concerned with problems of development of Russian youth education, as well as subjects of the Arctic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]