RANKING THE REGIONS OF THE NORTHWESTERN FEDERAL DISTRICT AS A SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT POLICY TOOL

The study reported in this paper ranked the regions of the Northwestern Federal District according to the degree of their socio-economic development to evaluate such regions’ sustainable development. It used a ranking algorithm to calculate the socio-economic development indices. The index of economic development of a region is calculated not only through the given average per capita values but also through the average values of the financial indicators, considering the number of employed individuals in the region. The index is an integral one, calculated as the sum of the partial integral indices. In this method, various difficult-to-compare indicators can be analysed to measure the degree of sustainable development achieved by the regions. The algorithm relies on balancing the importance of social and economic development. Striking such balance is essential for maintaining sustainable development in the long term. Thus, to calculate the final index of socio-economic development considering both social and economic development, equal shares are assigned to the components of the index, such as the index of the maturity level of the region’s economy and the index of the maturity level of the social sphere. However, if each index is calculated separately, a different set of indicators with various specific weights is used. For example, to measure the index of economic maturity, the index of the industrialisation level in the region and the index of enterprise financial status are considered, and in this case, a greater specific weight is assigned to industrialisation. To calculate the index of the social sphere, the following indicators are considered: the index of the monetary income of the population in the region and the index of the quality of the social situation in the region. All these indices have an additional division according to the method described in the book Investment Potential of the Russian Economy by Bard, Buzulukov, Drogobytsky and Shchepetova (2003). Using the algorithm for calculating the indices of socio-economic development, we can judge the state of the economy and the social sphere at a specific time (in our case, we studied the 2018 data) and their potential for achieving sustainable economic development in the end. The result of the study is the ranking of the regions of the Northwestern Federal District, which considers their socio-economic development and how favourable their climate is for achieving the sustainable development of the territories. The regions that received above-average index values were St. Petersburg, Leningrad Region, Kaliningrad Region and Murmansk Region.