Spatial Differentiation of the Economic Structure of the Russian Regions of the Arctic Zone

The Regions located in the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation implement an important function in the development of an export potential of the country. The richest nature-resource potential of the land and the sea should be considered as the favorable factors of manufacture development in the Arctic zone. The negative factors constraining the development of the Arctic zone are as follows: severe nature-climatic conditions; considerable remoteness of the region from the subjects of the Russian Federation being socially and economically more developed; weak economic (including infrastructural) mastering of this territory; a low demographic potential of the population. The goal of the studies is to reveal the existing spatial differentiation of the economic activities in the northern latitude areas of the country. The authors have compiled several diagrams and maps to estimate the differences in the branch structure of gross value added of the subjects of the Arctic zone of Russia. Besides that, a variance of the areas’ shares in comparison with the average value of the Russian Federation as a whole has been estimated. The analysis of the features of spatial differentiation of the economic activities of the Arctic regions allows us to determine the certain tendencies of the development of economic structures for the future. The article is intended for those experts and students who are interested in the problems of the development of the northern regions of the Russian Federation.The research was supported by the Program for Fundamental Studies Support of the Presidium of the RAS (No. 44 P) “Exploratory Fundamental Research in Aimed at the Development of the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation”

Linking pattern to process in cultural evolution: explaining material culture diversity among the Northern Khanty of Northwest Siberia

Book description: This volume offers an integrative approach to the application of evolutionary theory in studies of cultural transmission and social evolution and reveals the enormous range of ways in which Darwinian ideas can lead to productive empirical research, the touchstone of any worthwhile theoretical perspective. While many recent works on cultural evolution adopt a specific theoretical framework, such as dual inheritance theory or human behavioral ecology, Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution emphasizes empirical analysis and includes authors who employ a range of backgrounds and methods to address aspects of culture from an evolutionary perspective. Editor Stephen Shennan has assembled archaeologists, evolutionary theorists, and ethnographers, whose essays cover a broad range of time periods, localities, cultural groups, and artifacts

The Inverse Agreement Constraint in Uralic languages

The paper aims to answer the question why object–verb agreement is blocked in Hungarian, Tundra Nenets, Selkup, and Nganasan if the object is a first or second person pronoun. Based on Dalrymple & Nikolaeva (2011), it is argued that object–verb agreement serves (or served historically) to mark the secondary topic status of the object. The gaps in object-verb agreement can be derived from the Inverse Agreement Constraint, a formal, semantically unmotivated constraint observed by Comrie (1980) in Chukchee, Koryak and Kamchadal, forbidding object-verb agreement if the object is more ʻanimate’ than the subject: The paper claims that the Inverse Agreement Constraint is a constraint on information structure. What it requires is that a secondary topic be less topical than the primary topic. An object more topical than the primary topic can only figure as a focus. A version of the constraint can also explain why Hungarian first and second person objects have no accusative suffix, and why accusative marking is optional in the case of objects having a first or second person possessor

Challenging the state educational system in Western Siberia: taiga school by the Tiuitiakha River

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Request for 2 New Cyrillic Characters for the Khanty and Nenets Languages

This is a proposal to add 2 characters to the international character encoding standard Unicode to represent Khanty and Nenets languages in Far North (Siberia). These additions were published in Unicode Standard version 7.0 in June 2014

Regional differentiation of human potential indicators

The purpose of the study presented in this article is an interregional analysis of human potential. The quality of the population proper is investigated at the regional level far less than the quality of the population life. The article provides an extended characteristic of human potential in seven directions: economic activity, demographic processes, physical health, the cultural potential of population, social health, educational potential, the attitude of population to the environment. On the basis of official statistics for 2008–2012, there were selected 63 indicators characterizing human potential in all these directions. In the final result, the correlation analysis has led to the substantiation of the system of indicators for the level of human potential development, consisting of 10 indicators. The system included 3 economic indicators and 7 social indicators characterizing human potential. Upon these indicators the Russian regions were divided in two types of regions by means of hierarchic agglomerative (combining) methods of cluster analysis: the regions with economic indicators and without them. The performed calculations provided the typology of regions by the human potential indicators being stable over time and covering 74.4 % of the Russian population. A substantial interpretation of breaking down regions by groups, identification of both strong and weak aspects of each cluster were made, finding out specific features of the regions falling under the clusters. The obtained results can be used when working out measures for reducing the interregional inequality in the levels of human potential development. To find out what measures can be effective, it is possible to examine the strategic directions of regions’ development in the cluster that is the most successful with respect to the human potential characteristics under investigation

Economic Autonomy of Regions in the New Reality

The article expands on the concept of new reality (new normal) for Russia, which includes the increased role of individuals and larger economic autonomy of territories in their interaction with the federal center. The rationale is based on the hypothesis that, in the new reality, the improved wellbeing of people and elimination of economic disparities between the territories can be ensured by expanding their economic autonomy, because it leads to the increase in their intellectual, industrial and technological capacity. In this study, the author used the basic provisions of the classical economic theory, the theory of behavioral economics, interdisciplinary approach, and the method of statistical groupings. The article presents the trends in the economic autonomy of the territories, which include a decrease in the number of donor regions and differentiation of territories in terms of their socio-economic indicators. It substantiates the assumption that the differentiation of territories puts constrains on their socio-economic development and may lead to the emergence of a «regional peripheral economy,» the attribute of which is the dependence of the periphery from the center, reduced local initiative, and slowdown of technological development. The article identi es the need to use the mindset of people, their psychological attitudes in the economic development, the «second invisible hand of the market» and «soft power» in order to move beyond the «regional peripheral economy.» The conducted study demonstrates that the expansion of economic autonomy of the territories is not the increased self-isolation of regions and municipal entities, but consists in the need to retain a signi cant part of the income from the production of goods and services created by local people, so that it could be autonomously used by regional and municipal authorities and directed to improving the wellbeing of territory’s residents.The author proposes to prepare a regulatory and legal document in order to ensure and strengthen the economic autonomy of the territories, and makes speci c proposals on the principles of its content and structure.This article has been prepared with the financial support of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Project No. 15–14–7-2

Methodological approaches to accounting the depletion of natural resources, changes in the environmental and human capital in the gross regional product

A key indicator of the System of National Accounts of Russia at a regional scale is Gross Regional Product characterizing the value of goods and services produced in all sectors of the economy in a country and intended for final consumption, capital formation and net exports (excluding imports). From a sustainability perspective, the most weakness of GRP is that it ignores depreciation of man-made assets, natural resource depletion, environmental pollution and degradation, and potential social costs such as poorer health due to exposure to occupational hazards. Several types of alternative approaches to measuring socio-economic progress are considering for six administrative units of the Ural Federal District for the period 2006-2014. Proposed alternatives to GRP as a measure of social progress are focused on natural resource depletion, environmental externalities and some human development aspects. The most promising is the use of corrected macroeconomic indicators similar to the “genuine savings” compiled by the World Bank. Genuine savings are defined in this paper as net savings (net gross savings minus consumption of fixed capital) minus the consumption of natural non-renewable resources and the monetary evaluations of damages resulting from air pollution, water pollution and waste disposal. Two main groups of non renewable resources are considered: energy resources (uranium ore, oil and natural gas) and mineral resources (iron ore, copper, and aluminum). In spite of various shortcomings, this indicator represents a considerable improvement over GRP information. For example, while GRP demonstrates steady growth between 2006 and 2014 for the main Russian oil- and gas-producing regions – Hanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrugs, genuine savings for these regions decreased over all period. It means that their resource-based economy could not be considered as being on a sustainable path even in the framework of “weak” sustainability, i.e. sustainability under the assumption that the accumulation of producible physical capital and of human capital can compensate for losses in natural non reproducible resources.The research has been supported by the Russian Science Foundation (Project № 14-18-00574 "Anti-crisis information-analytical system: diagnostics of regions, threat assessment and scenario forecasting in order to keep and to strengthen economic security and well-being of Russia")

European Arctic Initiatives Compendium

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