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Unevenness and Structural Diversity of the Economy’s Spatial Development As a Scientific Problem and Russian Reality

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Abstract—

The article contains an attempt to analyze the unevenness and diversity in general and in the context of spatial economic development at the level of scientific concepts with examples of countries of the world, Russia, and its regions. Unevenness and diversity in spatial economics are shown as not independent but different phenomena. Diversity may include unevenness as a special case but is more often associated with qualitative features, including structural ones. Unevenness is generated by inequality and generates inequality time and again at certain stages. Various combinations of two spatial phenomena are probable and exist in reality. In simple terms, unevenness is diverse, and diversity is uneven. Enlarged structural types are distinguished, whose dynamics identify directions of shifts in both spatial and sectoral structure of the GRP (GVA) and employment inside Russia. The main shift is from predominantly industrial structures to predominantly service ones, which is not unique but is complicated by several crisis-driven and other deviations from the trend. This shift is not quite logical, affecting both the center and the periphery and being accompanied by simplification and complication of economic structures. In industry, the prevailing loss of sectoral diversity and complexity of regional structures is shown to combine with the growing concentration of production, i.e., its unevenness, within regions (Russia’s federal subjects), while larger parts of the country equalize due to a shift to the east. Russia is generally not a dropout from the common trends of structural economic transformation, typical of large countries of the global semiperiphery; these trends make their way despite all various fluctuations and failures.

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Notes

  1. The poet and one of the first Russian private farmers Afanasy Fet said in 1871 that people accustomed to continual money flows in the capitals did not understand how a whole vast area sits without a penny for months [18]. Half a century later, in 1921, Vladimir Lenin spoke of patriarchalism, half-wildness, and real savagery reigning in the spaces of the RSFSR [6, p. 228]. Fet’s words are said as if yesterday. The relevance of Lenin’s thesis is less obvious in the absence of clear criteria for savagery, but no one canceled the transition from quantity to quality.

  2. By the way, on scientific priority. The West is still sure that the three-sector scheme was introduced by Arthur Fisher and Colin Clark [21, 24], whereas the first was Dmitry Mendeleev [7, p. 65]. According to the 1897 census, he divided householders into “miners,” who took raw materials in nature; industrialists, who processed these raw materials; and people who gave society something very different than the daily bread. These are the same sectors, although they were called “primary,” etc., three decades later by the aforementioned British.

  3. Regardless of productivity, the agricultural sector remains an important functional element of production [11, p. 388]. Unequal exchange (price scissors), the food role of the sector, and its social role should be borne in mind. The poor on the ground at least feed themselves and do not flood the cities as new proletarians, unemployed, and criminals.

  4. Hereinafter, it must be taken into account that Moscow’s industrial power is overestimated by statistics, which, for example, ascribes about 10% of the Russian mineral production to the capital (the share is twice as large in the city’s output).

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Funding

This article was supported within the framework of the state-ordered research theme of the Institute of Geography RAS, no. 0148-2019-0008 (“Problems and Prospects of Russia’s Territorial Development in Terms of Its Unevenness and Global Instability”).

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  1. Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, 119017, Moscow, Russia

    A. I. Treivish

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Translated by B. Alekseev

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Treivish, A.I. Unevenness and Structural Diversity of the Economy’s Spatial Development As a Scientific Problem and Russian Reality. Reg. Res. Russ. 10, 143–155 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1134/S207997052002015X

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