Regional Development Corporations: Foreign Experience and Russian Practice

Abstract

The article is focused on the chronology and classification of territorial development agencies (corporations) as an instrument of state regional policy. The paper shows the threat of transformation of the potentially constructive role of corporations into a negative plane. The example of Poland illustrates the EUʼs intervention in the countryʼs internal affairs through regional development corporations as contact points. In Kazakhstan, the first wave of social and entrepreneurial corporations, which were created in 2006–2007 on an extraterritorial basis, caused an internal conflict between the elites, which led to the reformatting of this institution and its subordination to the existing system of regional management (“one district – one region”). The pluralism of approaches to the formation of a network of regional development corporations (“bottom-up” – “top-down”, monoterritoriality – extraterritoriality, etc.) provides opportunities for managerial experimentation, the results of which in the territory of the Russian Federation were expressed in the mass of economic and managerial structures at the federal and regional levels. At the same time, the macroeconomic success of their joint activities remains unclear. For the Russian Federation, the model of consolidation and development of the internal economic space on the basis of corporations of macroregions representing a set of neighboring subjects of the Russian Federation and historically having economic ties of varying degrees of breadth and strength seems appropriate. The model under consideration is based on a new institution of state ownership (macroregion ownership), which allows solving the problems of economic integration of territories by building extraterritorial production and economic complexes.