2019 Issue №3

After the demise of the USSR the Kaliningrad region became a Russian exclave, geographically separated from the rest of Russia by foreign states. The development of the region became dependent on external factors, including Russia’s political relations with foreign countries, NATO and EU. Geopoliti­cal changes required adjustments in the region’s socio-economic development strategy. In the period of 1991 to 2018 three comprehensive strategies suc­ceeded one another: Special economic zone (SEZ) strategy, Cooperation region strategy, International development corridor strategy. The article describes specific characteristics of each strategy. It is based on the analysis of academic publications, data from the Russian Federal State Statistics Service and the Federal Customs Service of Russia. Common economic and statistical methods are used to process the data. The article identifies the factors contributing to the strategies development and provides qualitative and quantitative assess­ment of their implementation. The article also demonstrates the potential of the Kaliningrad region in the Greater Eurasia project and the importance of the project for the development of the region as the International development corridor.

The article focuses on the issues of innovative development of coastal ag­glomerations, as advancement drivers for the regions of Southern Russia, which experience a reduction in contact potential in modern geo-economic conditions that complicates international economic and technological coopera­tion. The aim of the study is to identify the specifics of the information metab­olism processes as the basis of innovative development taking place in the Ros­tov agglomeration being the largest coastal agglomeration in the South of Russia. Given the proposed concept model of information metabolism, the study recreates the general picture of the cyclic spatio-temporal dynamics of innovations in coastal agglomerations, and reveals the role of economic clus­ters, as well as the nature of coastal component’s influence in achieving inno­vative development and metabolism processes of explicit and tacit knowledge. Theoretical positions and hypotheses are tested through analyzing official re­gional statistics, as well as the data of the expert survey. The study revealed the intra-system mechanisms to compensate for the reduction of codified knowledge flows in the Rostov agglomeration via the active clustering of in­novation sector, accompanied by the dynamics of tacit knowledge and the shrinking of its spatial imbalances. Moreover, the research uncovered the neg­ative side effects of geo-economic trends that threaten the reproduction of in­novations in the agglomeration space.

The innovative development of a region is the essential condition for in­creasing its competitiveness. The reintegration of the Republic of Crimea into the Russian Federation requires considerable efforts aimed at overcoming ex­ternal geo-economic barriers in socio-economic development, as well as at re­vitalizing the economic activities of enterprises, including production highly demanded innovative items. Given the new information concept of the Repub­lic of Crimea the paper attempts to analyze the features of territorial develop­ment of socio-economic and innovation system. The study determined the dig­italization of economic entities of the Republic of Crimea. The innovation dis­tribution in the region is checked on the example of the mobile network mod­ernizing. The innovative infrastructure of the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol is identified to be in the early development phase.

The exclave and coastal position of the Kaliningrad region determines the development conditions that differ from other regions, including those of the regional innovation subsystem. The most important and integral part of this subsystem which actually ensures the interaction of its components, is trans­fer of technologies. The main "holders" of technologies in the Kaliningrad re­gion are the universities. Kaliningrad State Technical University performs 37.6 % of the work in the area of innovations, a significant amount of work is implemented by the Federal Fishery Agency. Transfer of technologies for IKBFU is academic, which is typical for a classical university (some few works are carried out within the branches developing under the influence of the “coastal factor”). The analysis clearly demonstrates that in the Kaliningrad region these sectors are not in any significant demand, largely due to the change in economic specialization of the region, which occurred as a result of the collapse in the 90s.