This article analyzes the debt standing of 189 Russian urban okrugs with over 100 000 residents and the factors that define the differences in the debt situation among these urban okrugs. The study was conducted using the municipal debt size and structure indices contained on official websites of local administrative bodies, as well as the data on local fiscal revenue and expenditures from Rosstat’s database of municipal bodies. The results of the analysis show that urban okrugs with a larger population suffer from a higher debt burden on their budgets: the worst debt standing is characteristic of million-plus urban okrugs and other major regional centers. At the same time, there is no explicit dependence of the debt indicators on the fiscal situation and the level of economic development. This dependence is violated by the impact of other institutional conditions, including features of the federal and regional fiscal policies, social assistance of large businesses and other reasons. According to the analysis of the purposes of municipal loans to the studied urban okrugs, there are very few cases in which the debt is taken for the implementation of urban development projects. In Russia, the market for municipal bonds, which are a widespread phenomenon abroad, remains undeveloped as well as other new ways of reducing municipal debt burdens. All of this generates a negative forecast of the budget and financial standing of the largest centers for the next several years and again proves the acute need for reconsidering the fiscal and tax policy and the system of distributing powers at the local level.

The article presents a structured review of foreign theoretical approaches to explaining the inequality of cities in terms of socio-economic development. The purpose of the article is to fill the lack of knowledge about these approaches in the Russian-language scientific literature, as well as to popularize their use in Russian urban studies. The article shows that the bulk of theories explaining the emergence and dynamics of inter-urban inequality have been developed only since the 1970s–90s. The evolution of theories of inter-urban inequality poorly corresponds with the general course of paradigm shift in geographical research: although there is an increase in attention to the consideration of human factors in later theoretical approaches (as in the humanistic paradigm in geography), they do not prevail over approaches based on economic theories and continue to develop along with the last ones. Several economic theoretical approaches of the XX century get a new reading in the studies of the 2000s and 2010s (the theory of allometric scaling of cities, the theory of agglomeration advantages, etc.). The newest theoretical approaches of the 2010s–20s, in comparison with ones of the 1990s–2000s, are characterized by a concentration of attention on a smaller number of more specific factors (for example, regulation of the housing market, the implementation of «smart city» elements), the assessment of which requires the expansion of the use of qualitative methods. There is no dominance of any of the invented theories – both old and new theories are used by foreign authors in modern studies of intercity inequality. The emergence of new approaches in the 2020s underlines that the theoretical framework of research in the field of inter-urban inequality still continues to develop.

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