Formation of a Modern Neoliberal Model of Russia’s Regional Policy

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, a significant number of normative legal acts regulating various aspects of spatial development have been adopted in our country; the main ones regulating the key areas of regional development can be called the Decree of President B. N. Yeltsin “On the Main Provisions of Regional Policy in the Russian Federation”, which was in force from 1996 to 2017 and was replaced by the Decree of President V.V. Putin “On the approval of the Foundations of the State Policy of Regional Development of the Russian Federation for the period up to 2025”, adopted in 2017. In this study the individual provisions of the regional policy implemented in modern Russia are revealed. The object of the analysis was published regulatory documents characterizing the state policy of federal authorities in a field of regional socio-economic development. The main methods of work were chosen: analysis and systematization of scientific publications, collection, formalization and analysis of normative documents, traditional (internal and external) and legal analysis, as well as retrospective and comparative methods, generalization and systematization. As a result, the author concludes that the regional policy of Russia corresponds to the neoliberal paradigm of management. Including: a basis of economic policy to date remains, on the one hand, a priority creation of local preferences, on the other – a stimulation of the subjects of the Federation for the development of foreign economic activity; social policy, reduced to the nominal possibility of using a set of social guarantees that are supposed to be linked to a settlement system; a program of measures for a development of federal relations as a whole boils down to establishing a relationship between the degree of efficiency of regional economy and the size of transfer payments from the federal center.