To Boost Productivity, Russia Must Shift Focus from Regions to Agglomerations, ‘Nezavsimaya Gazeta’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 22 – For more than a decade, various Russian officials, politicians and experts have urged that Moscow promote the development of urban agglomerations rather than continuing to focus on existing federal subjects. Demographic and economic trends are making their arguments even more compelling, the editors of Nezavisimaya Gazeta say.

            The paper points out that productivity in Moscow is growing at 2.5 times that of the country as a whole and that this increase is not connected with the oil and gas industries and thus meets Putin’s call for raising productivity overall in order to compensate for increasing shortages of cadres (ng.ru/editorial/2024-10-23/2_9121_red.html).

            The Moscow agglomeration, the editors argue, must become a model for the rest of the country where many of the 30 million residents of small cities and approximately 15 million people in rural areas are currently unable to find highly productive work, something that is holding the country back.

            That means, they suggest, that the country must adopt a developmental strategy based on the development of an increasing number of urban agglomerations where productivity will increase and end its focus on existing territorial divisions which will never be the locations of high productivity.

            Indeed, Nezavisimaya Gazeta argues, “high tempos of the market development of Russia are possible exclusively along the paths of the establishment of new agglomerations in various parts of the country,” something especially important at a time when existing economic and demographic trends are working against such increases in productivity.

            If the Kremlin accepts this argument – and the Putin administration’s concern with demography and productivity mean that the authors of it are speaking the language of the Presidential Administration – that could presage a shift in Moscow’s development strategy away from existing regions to new urban centers.

            And this in turn could upend the existing administrative-territorial divisions of the country on which much of its current political arrangements and even stability are predicated, leading not so much to the amalgamation of federal subjects Putin has pursued in the past but to the neglect of regions as a result of a new focus on megalopolises instead.