Assessment of the Impact of Scientific and Technological Progress on the Dynamics of Russian Regions' Economic Growth

At present, researchers of regional development pay special attention to the innovative component of economic growth, since innovation policy is an integral part of the strategy of industrial and innovative development and is the main tool for increasing the competitiveness of the economy. The purpose of this study is to analyze and evaluate the innovation component in the economic development of the regions of Russian Federation. This research makes a quantitative assessment of the contribution of scientific and technological progress into the economic development of the region. According to the constructed models in the form of production functions in current and comparable prices, taking into account scientific and technological progress, as well as to the corresponding Solow models, in this study the numerical values of the parameters characterizing the impact of scientific and technological progress on the dynamics of the indicator of gross regional product are determined and the contribution of the Solow residual to the economic growth of regions of the Russian Federation is estimated. The simulation was carried out for the Russian Federation as a whole, and for eighty-three regions and eight federal districts. Such macroeconomic indicators as the gross regional product, the cost of fixed assets, the population, the number of employed in the economy, the number of economically active population were chosen for the construction of models. The conducted research allowed to quantify the contribution of scientific and technological progress into the economic growth of the region and to identify the regions with the largest and smallest shares of the contribution of scientific and technological progress into the dynamics of the gross regional product growth. Statistical data for 16 years (2000-2015) were used to build macroeconomic models. Corresponding software "EGRMod v2.0" was designed to run under Windows operating systems in MS Access environment or under the control of the AccessRuntime library. An external Access database is used for data accumulation. Numerical calculations are performed in SQL language using VBA. The research is supported by the grant of the Russian Science Foundation No 16-18-10017 "Complex of programs for forecasting the economic development of a region".