Characteristics of the Basic Socio-Economic Factors of the Development of Small Towns in Russia

Abstract

Currently, small towns in Russia are going through a difficult period due to changes in the economic situation, demographic trends and financial constraints. These factors have a significant impact on the lives of citizens and require in-depth study and analysis. The purpose of the study is to identify the general features of small forms of settlement as part of the regional socio-economic system for the further development of proposals for the formation of specific measures for the socio-economic development of small towns. The research was conducted on a sample of data from 82 regions of Russia for 2018–2022 according to 11 statistical hypotheses. The work used modern methods of statistical analysis, including testing the normality of distribution (ShapiroWilk statistics), equality of variances (Livigne criterion) and the method of statistical testing of hypotheses based on the Mann-Whitney test. Calculations were performed in the Python software environment using the NumPy and Pandas libraries for data preprocessing and SciPy and XlsxWriter for statistical analysis and export results. The following socio-economic indicators are considered: average per capita cash income of the population, gross regional product and investment in fixed capital per capita, average turnover of organizations and the share of the population with cash income below the subsistence level. It is shown that, within the framework of the existing administrative structure of regional governance, regions with different levels of urbanization have statistically significant differences in these indicators. At the same time, no such differences were found in relation to indicators such as expenditures and revenues of consolidated budgets per person, the total area of residential premises per inhabitant on average, the fertility rate, the population maturity index and the dynamics of population change over 10 years (2012-2022 inclusive).