Scenarios of the old industrial regions' development: Selecting the methodology

Management of the old industrial regions' development is a very actual problem, in particular for the post-Soviet countries. It is connected with the fact that the purposes of manufacture modernization which provide employment and incomes of the population of such regions, can contradict requirements of environmental protection. Here the most different scenarios of development are possible which need to be evaluated. Usual neoclassical criteria for this purpose do not match. Therefore, in our paper, there was a task to develop such criterion which can be used for regulation of the old industrial regions' development taking into account the environmental factor. The paper begins with construction of regional economy model. Our model based on the J. Forrester's "world model" idea, i. e. it considers the influence of environmental pollution (atmosphere, water, earth) on the population disease level, and then-on the lifetime and the human capital; the latter ones are considered as one of the most important factors of the economic growth. On the ground of this model, the consequences for realization of different scenarios of the regional economy development are estimated. To substantiate the regulation of regional economy, the criterion of sustainable development, based on the idea of simultaneous improvement of economic and ecological parameters, is offered. The main feature of the criterion offered is that, first of all, it guarantees simultaneous improvement of each of the chosen indicators of the region's development, and, second, allows considering interests of various coalition groups by finding realistic compromises at a choice of ways of old industrial regions' development. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.