Promotion of Agglomerations Won’t Help Most Russian Regions or the Country as a Whole, Karelian Economist Warns

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 30 – Many Moscow officials believe that the growth of urban agglomerations will work to the benefit of the entire country, but Pavel Druzhinin, a Karelian economist, says that the data show that “the accelerated formation of agglomerations will not ead to the effective development of the regions” of Russia.

            Indeed, promoting agglomerations will not only pull people out of rural areas of their surrounding oblast, kray or republic but out of neighboring federal subjects, harming the economic prospects of both, the scholar at the Institute of Economics of the Karelian Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences says (realtribune.ru/uskorennoe-formirovanie-aglomeracij-ne-privedet-k-effektivnomu-razvitiju-regionov).

            Indeed, he argues, on the basis of new research, “the growth of administrative centers of regions is practically not connected with the growth of the regional economy per capita for the region as a whole” because any growth in the central city is undercut by declines in the economy of the remaining part of the region.

            Significantly, Moscow and St. Petersburg are exceptions. There, the cities are helping the regions around them to rise. That may explain why some in the Russian capital believe the promotion of agglomerations is a panacea for the Russian economy; but the role of other cities in Russia is very different and far less positive for the surrounding areas.

            In an article for Problems of Prediction, Druzhinin says that “regions which already have major agglomerations do show a more rapid growth in the regional economy,” but those which don’t and where Moscow would like to promote agglomerations won’t have the same outcomes. Instead, they will see a degradation in the economy and standards of living.

            Indeed, he warns explicitly: “Only for regions which have major agglomerations already can the acceleration of their growth have a positive effect.” But even then, these will “not compensate for the negative effect other regions will experience who lose human capital.” And thus agglomerations as a basic policy will harm the economic development of Russia as a whole.