New Instruments Attracting Investment into the Russian Far East: Preliminary Assessment

Abstract

In 2015 the federal government of Russia introduced new instruments to attract private investment into the Far East, namely ‘Advanced Special Economic Zone (ASEZ)’ and ‘Free Port of Vladivostok (FPV)’. With these instruments the government anticipated to develop export-oriented industries in the region. In this paper the author tried to conduct preliminary assessment of their performance, focusing on number of residents by territory and industry. Statistics of total number of their residents demonstrate positive dynamics, as there are 330 residents in 18 ASEZ territories and 912 residents in five FPV territories at the end of third quarter of 2018. Their breakdowns by territory, as well as by industry show several specific features, like popularity of FPV over ASEZ, attractiveness of ‘comprehensive ASEZs’ close to large cities and propensity to certain types of service industries. Explicit export-orientation is not observed within the assessment. The assessment is preliminary one that was derived only from the resident statistics based on the Registries of residents composed by the FEDC. Further investigation is required in order to properly assess effectiveness of the two instruments. The most significant deficiency is that the Registries lack information on scale of business such as investment amount, number of employees, anticipated and actual output or sales volume and so on