Digitalization of the Municipal Economy: Global Trends and Practice of Russian Municipalities

Abstract

The transformation of the municipal economy in the late XX – early XXI centuries increased the im-portance of the use of interactive information tech-nologies in the urban environment, increasing their influence on the formation of a smart modern urban space that meets the level of development of society in accordance with the concept of sustainable de-velopment. The subject of the research is the fea-tures of the digitalization of municipal governance in modern realities. The task is to identify the main trends in the digitalization of the municipal man-agement system in the face of uncertainty and trans-formation of economic realities. In order to assess the features of the transformation and development of municipalities in the context of widespread digi-talization of economic processes, the evolution of informatization of the municipal management sys-tem in the Russian Federation has been investigat-ed. The results of the study were to determine the goal of creating and developing a unified infor-mation space in Russia, identifying elements of a unified information space of a municipality, as well as directions for using information technologies in managing municipalities, as well as requirements for the formation of its interactive elements. The meth-odological basis of the study was formed on the basis of content analysis of scientific research and economic and statistical data characterizing the trends and tendencies of digitalization of municipal-ities. To assess the development of the digital econ-omy in the cities of the Russian Federation, meth-ods of comparative analysis of world and Russian smart practices, as well as trends in smart cities launched on ICT, were applied. During the study, it was revealed that the developed principles of the Smart City project are especially important in mod-ern conditions of neo-industrialization and reindus-trialization, however, the trend of budget non-fulfillment of the Digital Economy national project that took place in 2019, which was designed to be-come the basis for the development of all other fed-eral programs, continued under the constraints as-sociated with COVID-2019, showing the worst budg-etary execution result for the period January – Au-gust 2020. The result of the study was an assess-ment of not only the economic parameters of the socio-economic, institutional and other order that determine the effectiveness of the implementation of a national project, but also a comparison of the qualitative characteristics of the domestic digitaliza-tion of municipalities with foreign counterparts. Recommendations were developed to eliminate cur-rent problems in order to increase the efficiency of digitalization of the municipal economy and en-hance its participation in solving national develop-ment priorities.