European Regional Science Association
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European Regional Science Association
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The abstract for paper number 359:
Anna Weinberg, Academy of Economic Studies, Moscow, Russia
Quantitative evaluation of the Russian regions socio-economic situation and development during the transition period
A large and quickly growing volume of literature about Russian regions and the transition period of the post-Soviet economies and societies proposes a great variety of observations, separate theories and even numerical studies. Nevertheless any relevant and sufficiently general theory does not exist, the experience of ex-socialist countries, ex-republics of the former Soviet Union and also of Russian regions being extremely difficult to summarize.
The first step forward on a full of obstacles path of constructing a relevant socio-economic theory consists 1) in analyzing connections between variables, specially conditional correlations, where we can see relationship between two variables independently of all others; 2) in choosing an interconnected set of critical variables and thus reducing the number of variables under study.
Thus we propose to apply classical principal components analysis and new techniques of graphical models to discover the structures already existing in the data and to check different hypothesis exposed in the literature.
We apply these techniques to the analysis of the Russian regions socio-economic situation and development during the transition period. For example, we draw the conclusion that in this time the importance of the geographic and historical factors diminishes comparing to the increasing of the role of socio-economic variables. We also obtain some evidences of the importance of the reforms for the regional development.
Unfortunately full paper has not been submitted.