An assessment of the growing local economic development function of local authorities in Russia

This paper investigates the increasing local economic development role of the Russian local government by analyzing central forces and local conditions that affect the geographic variation of two types of local government activity in a centrally planned economy: declarations of special economic zone status and declarations of sovereignty. A conceptual framework for explaining increasing local activity is proposed and tested using discriminant analysis. The empirical results largely support the hypothesis that both local conditions and central forces influence local government economic development initiatives. The local conditions measuring the social context and describing the labor force composition and central forces representing central-local fiscal relations differentiate the regional governments choosing particular types of activity from those that did not. The findings indicate that future research should examine in more detail the social and material forces underlying this increasing local economic development role for the Russian local government. -Author