Eurasian Continental Integration: Prerequisites and Difficulties

Siberia in the post‐Soviet stage: Transformation of territorial structure of economic and settlement system

“…In the future, co‐operation between Russia and China to create international transport corridors, including high‐speed railways, is inevitable. The issue of possible competition in transit traffic between the Russian Trans‐Siberian Railway and the routes of the Chinese Silk Road was revealed in (Bezrukov, 2019). At the same time, we believe that so far there is no good reason for the threat of China's demographic expansion into Siberia and the Far East, as indicated, for example, by the respected political scientist and futurologist P. Khanna(2016).…”

“…First, the deeper regions of other countries, being much smaller than Siberia in terms of area and importance, have not yet reached its level of industrial development and don't have the problems in the form of high transportation costs causing a decrease in production efficiency. The powerful economic potential of Siberia is implemented mainly through the export of large‐tonnage raw materials and semi‐finished products along long and expensive land routes, as a result of which the share of transportation costs in the final cost of certain types of products reaches values unprecedented for other countries of the world—sometimes up to 50–70% and above (Bezrukov, 2008, 2019). The excessively high transport component significantly reduces the profitability of work, profitability and price competitiveness of products of most industries and branches of the Siberian industry, and in terms of export efficiency, the macro‐region loses substantially to maritime regions and countries that widely use the advantages of maritime transport.…”

“…Meanwhile, statistics greatly underestimates the basic economic indicators of the macro-region due to taking into account a significant part of them at the location of headquarters (usually, Moscow or St. Petersburg) of the of vertically integrated companies that control Siberian enterprises, as well as the use of special financial schemes and mechanisms. This can be judged by the dynamics of a number of indicators of Siberia in comparison with similar indicators of Moscow (as a subject of the Russian Federation) (Bezrukov, 2019). The brightest example is the change in export weights: in dynamics, this is a symmetrical mirror image of the fact that the "statistical" growth of Moscow is largely due to Siberia.…”