ECONOMIC INDEX FOR THE REGIONS OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

Abstract

At present a lot of techniques for the assessment of the state of economy in different countries and regions are available. The attempts are made to evaluate both economic growth and the economic progress of the territories. The Russian experience in elaborating such approaches is applied just in particular regions. A technique of the integral assessment of the economic progress and its components in the regions of theRussian Federationusing the economic index is suggested. The index takes into consideration the available experience of similar techniques; however the task of minimizing the number of indicators was particularly important in order to focus the attention on the most critical ones and to facilitate the interpretation of results by decision-makers. Nothing but formalized numerical official statistical data was used for the index calculation, thus escaping possible errors of judgmental evaluation. The index was calculated in two stages. In our opinion, the selected quantitative indicators are easy to use and, at the same time, provide a comprehensive picture of the qualitative changes in economy, the utilization of resource potential of a region, the scope of people’s individual consumption and the production of goods and services. They are the gross regional product (GRP), fixed assets value, direct foreign investments (DFI) and fixed investments. These indicators are informative in terms of the absolute contribution to the economic development of a region. For further analysis and mapping it was necessary to calculate two versions of the index, i.e. using the absolute values of indicators and those related to the mean annual population numbers. The results could be applied for monitoring the changes in the level of economic development, thus contributing to the solution of the consistent regional problems.