Ge eo oJ Jo ou ur rn na al l o of f TTo ou ur ri is sm m a an nd d G Ge eo os si it te es s Year X

An intensive movement of people, which is typical in areas with strong tourism industry, is perceived to provide numerous positive externalities with regards to the diversity of cultures, ideas, and knowledge. Border regions act as natural contact zones experiencing the influx of tourists across borders. The borderland is expected to benefit from their geolocation and intensive cross-border cooperation, acting as testing grounds for external innovations. The article iS designed to test the interdependence between the tourism industry and innovation activity in the borderland. The study focuses on the western border regions of Russia, which is a highly divergent area in terms of socio-economic development and experiences challenging times in the context of geo-economic turbulence after 2014. By using the statistical research method, the study develops on evaluating the dynamics of indicators for tourism industry development and innovation activity. The eight-year period of 2012-2019 is applied for taking into account the lag in innovation performance resulting from the positive externalities of tourism. Results show that the growth in tourism industry and innovation activity of found in regions with intensive public expenditure on large-scale infrastructural projects.

Throughout the history of humankind, people have settled along seashores. The gradual accumulation of population and industrial activity in coastal areas has created preconditions for coastalisation — the movement of people and socio-economic activity to marine coasts. To date, coastal areas have a higher rate of economic development, fostering migration and an influx of capital across the globe. Scholars and policymakers voice concerns about the asymmetry of regional development and the increasing anthropogenic impact on the coastal ecosystem. It reinforces the importance of coastal zone management. In this study, we use an example of the Baltic region to identify the coastalisation patterns in the Baltic region and answer the question, whether there can be a single definition of the coastal zone of the Baltic region. According to a broad definition, the Baltic macro-region is nearly all coastal and, consequently, all settlements are influenced by the coastalisation effect. We have studied the urban population dynamics in 128 cities of 45 coastal regions through the lens of various characteristics of a coastal city — the distance from the sea (10, 50, 100, and 150 km), location in a coastal region (NUTS 2), availability of a port and its primary maritime activity (tankers, cargo, fishing, passenger, recreational vessels and others). The research results suggest that despite the strong coherence of the Baltic region countries, there should not be a single delimitation approach to defining the coastal zone. Overall, the most active marine economic processes occur in the zone up to 10 km from the seacoast and 30 km from ports and port infrastructure. However, in the case of Sweden, Poland, and Latvia, the coastal zone can be extended to 50 km, and in Germany — up to 150 km inland.

No abstract

The coastal regions are increasingly in the focus of contemporary academic research as economically favorable territories with high innovative potential. The coastalization factor gets individual attention, the influence of which is registered in various countries of the world as a tendency of the population and economic activity to concentrate in the coastal zone. However, there is significant heterogeneity between the coastal areas, due to natural and climatic features and affecting their economic development. This paper focuses on assessing the differences in the readiness of the coastal regions of the European part of Russia to the innovation economy, taking into account their geographical location (northern, northwestern, southern). The study is conducted at the level of municipalities across 6 regions of Russia: Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, Leningrad, Kaliningrad, Rostov regions, and Krasnodar Krai. The research methodology included an assessment of 4 most important components of an innovative economy: human capital, business environment, knowledge production, and technological equipment. The results of the study showed a high degree of spatial divergence in terms of the level of readiness for the development of an innovative economy both between the regions of the sample and within them in the inter-municipal context. It is revealed that the concentration of innovative potential within the coastal region is largely the result of the cross-influence of the agglomeration and the coastalization factors. In the case of their complementary influence on coastal municipalities, the latter are characterized by a relatively higher level of readiness for the development of an innovative economy than inland ones. This is true for both the northern, northwestern, and southern coastal regions of the European part of Russia.