Digital economy is understood as the level of development of a social production system, involving the massive use of digital, information and communication technologies and allowing of fundamental modernization of the system of intersubjective interactions, while digital transformation is interpreted as a process of transition of socioeconomic systems to this level of development. The global goal of digital transformation is to form a new information and technological continuum as a qualitatively different environment for social development. The system of local objectives of digital transformation reflects the set of directions for the appearance of the expected transformation effects. The digitalization of the economy generates not only positive, but also negative transformational effects associated with the negative consequences of the large-scale introduction of digital technologies in public life and digital expansion into all spheres of human activity. The article describes the range of tasks facing the state, business and individuals, the solution of which will allow minimizing the negative transformational effects and the consequences of the identified threats.

The article states that the model of rural economy and rural area development formed in the Russian Federation as a result of transition of the economic paradigm is in deep controversy with actual interests and needs of considerable share of rural population and agricultural producers. The need is reasoned for designing prospective models of balanced territorial and sectoral development of regional agro-food complexes taking into account the specific features of agrarian structure of a region, conditions of development level of agricultural production and rural areas, and aimed at creation of the conditions promoting food security of the country, growth of the efficiency of using the rural development potential, mitigation of controversies between the subjects of agrarian relations and balance of their economic interests. The expediency of using such models as part of the deepening the differentiated approach to the development of rural areas, as stated in the “Strategy for the Sustainable Development of Rural Territories of the Russian Federation – 2030,” is pointed out. It is noted that the designed models of balanced territorial-sectoral development of regional agro-food complexes will be a formalized description of the conceptual provisions that determine the evolution of agro-economic systems at the regional level, differentiated according to the structure of the agrarian sector and the development level of agriculture and rural areas, under the conditions of increasing social responsibility of agribusiness, as well as reflecting the state’s place as a natural macro-regulator in the process management system of rural development and allowing assessing the economic and social implications of alternative scenarios for the development of agro-economic systems.

The article discusses the essence of the basic approaches to the definition of the concept “digital economy”. There is a lack of elaboration on the issues of establishinh the mechanism of transition from the traditional economy to the digital one and justification of the criteria allowing to fix the moment of this transition. A critical analysis of the contents of the program “Digital Economy of the Russian Federation” is conducted in the paper. The content of the categories “digital platform” and “digital ecosystem” is disclosed. Certain provisions regulating the conditions for implementing the digital transformation of economic systems are given. It is noted that the present stage is marked with the formation of the theoretical and methodological basis of the digital economy; insufficient attention is paid to the issues of the digital development of individual branches of social production, including agriculture. The paper argues that certain limitations on achieving the potential for the digitization of agriculture are imposed by the current structure of the agrarian sector of the economy of the Russian Federation. Therefore, it is highly necessary to adopt a state strategy to overcome the information backwardness of the agrarian sector and the formation of basic conditions for the initiation of the digital transformation of the most technologically advanced economic entities of the agrarian sector and the industry as a whole. The paper provides a list of basic information management tasks, the solution of which would create prerequisites for transferring agriculture to digital technologies, along with the principles reflecting the basic provisions of the formation of digital agriculture. The paper provides a directional digitalization model, which assumes active regulatory influence of the state on the processes of designing and developing industry digital platforms and ecosystems and the formation of macroeconomic conditions for creating and introducing digital technologies into business practice.

The task of agriculture digital transformation is one of the priority tasks for the development of the country’s agri-food system. A significant level of agricultural producers’ differentiation in terms of the technical, technological and informational development level, in terms of financial capabilities and the resource quality provision give rise to the presence of many constraints on of digital technologies mass use processes in the agricultural sector and the agriculture digital transformation as the branch of social production. In these conditions, there is an objective need to substantiate the agriculture digital transformation several models, which allow to take into account the level of individual economic entities readiness for digitalization, as well as the planned scale of their production systems transformation, the transformation processes speed and depth. The assessment of the economic entities readiness in the agricultural sector allows to talk about the complex and fragmented digitalization models, each of them will have several varieties due to differences in the digital transformation strategy.

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