THE INSTRUMENTS OF POLARIZED SPATIAL DEVELOPMENT POLICY

Abstract

The latest practice of state promoting of territorial development is based on using the instruments of acupuncture economic reviving of the territories. Its impulses, according to the concept of innovations diffusion, should spread widely beyond the bounds of the created “centers of growth”. Among such instruments a special place belongs to special legal regimes of conducting business and other economic activity on separate territories. The article analyzes the practice of using special legal regimes for the attraction of private investments and new technologies to the economy of the country and its regions. The paper reveals distinctive features of such instruments as special economic zones, zones of territorial development, territories of advanced development and estimates their productiveness and efficiency. The author characterizes key problems and recommends measures, aimed at improving the mechanisms of territorial development on the base of special legal regimes. It is shown that excessive enthusiasm for special regimes, which had become “the mainstream” of state regional policy, caused overestimated expectations, meanwhile practical results turned out to be very far from them. The growing number of various “zonal” formations with preferential regimes, created in different parts of the country, leads to the growing competition among them for state resources, for private investments and personnel. There is a necessity of coordination and congruousness in the adoption appropriate state solutions in the scale of the whole country.