DOES ECONOMIC-GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION AFFECT INNOVATION PROCESSES IN RUSSIAN REGIONS?

Stepan P Zemtsov,Vyacheslav L Baburin

doi:10.24057/2071-9388-2016-9-4-14-32

Abstract

A favourable economic-geographical position (EGP) of regions and cities is one of the factors of their socio-economic development. Economic agents can take advantages of their proximity to the major markets of goods and services, thereby reducing their transport costs and increasing their profitability. In the sphere of innovation, proximity to the innovation centres may also significantly affect the creation of new knowledge and technologies, due to the existence of tacit knowledge and knowledge spillovers. The authors propose the term ‘innovation-geographical position’ by analogy with EGP. It has been demonstrated that location matters to regional innovation output. If there is 1 % more new technologies in neighbouring regions, there are approximately 0.35–0.58 % more newly created technologies in the target region. Proximity to the world centres of new technologies has even greater impact.

Highlights

“Economic-geographical position”(EGP) is one of the key categories in the area of regional studies in Russia
Because of disadvantages of the data, we have introduced a new parameter, which reflects the number of potentially commericializable patents (Innov): Innov = 0.08Pat_rus + 0.5Pat_PCT, (8)
The paper has demonstrated the importance of the geographical position in relation to major centres of new technologies development

Summary

Introduction

“Economic-geographical position”(EGP) is one of the key categories in the area of regional studies in Russia. It is one of the few concepts originally emerged and developed in the national science; it has been rarely used outside of the Russianspeaking academic community. Thereby, advantageous EGP of regions and cities can be considered one of the factors of their socio-economic development. Does it matter for regional innovation output whether it is nearby other innovative regions or centres of new technologies?

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Methods

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Conclusion