Million-plus cities as a basis for the region’s economic growth

Abstract

Global trends indicate a sharp increase in the number of megalopolises and the creation of metropolitan territorial entities in order to accelerate economic growth and the formation of new sales markets. A similar paradigm of regional development due to the formation of mega-regions, on the largest and largest agglomerations as promising centers of economic growth was proposed in the new Spatial Development Strategy of the Russian Federation. However, the processes of globalization of territorial economic systems are not yet sufficiently studied and require new approaches to their economic and statistical research. The attempts to assess how acceptable and optimal this approach to Russian regions tere are in paper. For this purpose, the influence of agglomeration processes on the economic development of regions is investigated. Based on the typology and comparative analysis of the subjects of the Russian Federation on the principle of the inclusion of a million-plus city in its composition or the lack thereof, a hypothesis about the decisive influence of million-plus cities on the faster economic development of their regions was tested. The results of the study indicate the absence of significant influence of million-plus cities. This thesis is also confirmed by the typology of the subjects of the Russian Federation based on the method of portfolio analysis with the construction of a four-quadrant matrix in terms of the average per capita Gross regional product. The calculations were carried out using the regional statistics databases, published by Rosstat on the official website, for the years 1998–2016.

Keywords

• economic development
• urbanization
• megalopolis
• agglomeration
• million-plus cities
• gross regional product
• spatial development strategy
• typology
• matrix method