WHAT REGION IN THE ARCTIC HAS THE BEST CONDITIONS FOR THE IMPLEMENTATION OF REGIONAL INDUSTRIAL POLICY MEASURES?

Abstract

This article addresses the research question concerning the assessment of current prerequisites for implementing industrial policy within the Arctic territories of Russia through the efforts of local and regional authorities. The research goal required solving methodological problems, including how to evaluate these prerequisites, analytical problems encompassing individual and integrated scoring, and practical problems such as the differentiation of Arctic territories into responsive, neutral, or conservative regarding regional industrial policy measures. The study is based on regional and municipal statistical indicators, legal documents outlining industrial policy within Arctic regions, and data from the monthly monitoring of the Arctic conducted by the Institute of Regional Consulting. To perform an integrated assessment of the conditions, we employed 17 indicators grouped into five categories: 1) material factors (four indicators reflecting the volume and weight of the industrial sector in the regional economy); 2) spatial factors (four indicators assessing the degree of dispersion or concentration of regional industry locations); 3) technological factors (three indicators measuring the Arctic territory’s readiness for the fifth Kondratieff wave); 4) institutional factors (three indicators evaluating the involvement of key actors in industrial activities, the effectiveness of industrial partnerships, and the presence of established regional industrial policy institutions); 5) natural resource factors (three indicators offering a qualitative assessment of the region’s key resource assets). Upon integrating individual scores for five categories, which were derived as the arithmetic mean of normalized scores, four distinct groups of regions were identified. The first group, represented by the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug (YNAO) and the Krasnoyarsk Arctic, has the most favorable conditions for the deployment of new industrial policy measures. The second group, consisting of the well-established industrial region of Murmansk and the Arctic territories of the Arkhangelsk region, has relatively favorable conditions. The third group, comprising the Nenets Autonomous Okrug, the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, and the Arctic territories of the Komi Republic, is characterized by less favorable conditions. The fourth group, which includes the Arctic territories of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) and the Republic of Karelia, ranks as the least favorable in terms of implementing regional industrial policy measures.

Keywords

• assessment of industrial policy conditions
• quantitative and qualitative assessments
• integrated scoring
• arctic region categorization