Эмпирический анализ публикационной активности: конвергенция российских регионов?

Abstract

Scientific activity is one of the widely recognized sources of economic growth. Currently research is increasingly concentrating in universities. However, federal government policies were aimed at promoting science in Russian universities between the 2000s and 2010s and their consequences are difficult to interpret unambiguously, either positively or negatively. On the one hand, state policies were aimed at supporting universities; on the other hand, only the best universities received this support, which led, among other things, to a stratification of Russian regions in terms of the level of university science development. The solution to this problem is of great interest in terms of prioritizing public policy in support of research and its criteria, but so far these issues have not been sufficiently addressed in studies that include detailed empirical evidence. This article presents the results of an empirical study of the convergence of Russian regions in terms of the level of scientific development. Indicators of publication activity of universities for the period 2006-2015 aggregated at the regional level have been used to measure scientific development. The empirical estimation of convergence has been made on the basis of adapted methodology of economic convergence analysis, including the estimation of dynamic and spatial models of panel data by the system generalized method of moments. In general, the results obtained lad to the conclusion that there are processes of scientific convergence of Russian regions except for some sub-periods