Resilience of the Russian Regional Economies to the 2020 Pandemic
The study is devoted to assessing the resilience of Russian regions' economies to the 2020 pandemic and analysing its factors. We evaluate the regional economies' resilience using a set of per capita indicators, such as budget revenues and household incomes, production in the main sectors of the economy, and investments in fixed assets. We use two alternative methods for assessing the resilience of a region to an external shock: the modified method of R. Martin and R. Lagravinese, based on a comparison of regional trends with country-wide ones, and the author's approach, based on a comparison of pandemic indicators with non-pandemic forecasts of the region. All particular resilience indicators are normalized and reduced to an integral indicator. The study revealed the most significant resilience to the pandemic of some underdeveloped Russian regions, which received substantial government support and several border territories and Far Eastern regions, which benefited from the increase in metal prices. The more developed and large economies and the centres of the extractive industry demonstrated the lowest resilience. The calculation of correlations between resilience indices and regional development indicators confirmed the impact of the sectoral and institutional structure of the economy on its resistance to the shock. By building an econometric model estimated by the OLS method, we confirmed the positive impact of the share of employment in government-owned and municipal enterprises and the negative impact of the degree of openness, the size of the economy and the share of the mining industry on the regional economies' resilience. The conducted research is applicable in developing a balanced inter-budgetary, regional and sectoral policy in the context of economic crises of a pandemic type