Accessibility of the near-border regional markets in Russia and Finland: Evaluation methodology and its application results

Regions of the Russian Federation significantly differ in many indicators of the social economic development. As a result, the Russian regions are characterized by a high level of differentiation. Geographic location is one of the factors which is recognized by many scholars to be a pivotal prerequisite in supporting the uneven distribution of regional development. In this context, special attention is paid to the near-border regions being the areas with a competitive advantage, that is, they have an opportunity to interact economically from their near-border location which, first of all, provides transport accessibility. What is more, the near-border regions possess specific features which affect their indicators in social economic development and can be explained by a greater accessibility of the regional market for the trans-border economic cooperation. Along with that, the review of the literature reveals that the accessibility of the regional market on the near-border territories is not examined enough. Thus, the purpose of the research is to develop the methodology aimed to evaluate the accessibility level of the regional market on the near-border territories and to develop a classification of regions by their periphery level. The object of the study was the regions in the Russian Federation and Finland, which are the territories with near-border location, the subject of research is the regions’ differentiation by the accessibility level of the regional markets on the near-border territories. The study is scientifically novel in its methodological tools for evaluating the accessibility level of the regional market, which identifies the role of geographical location in the region’s economic development. To achieve the given purpose, the authors applied the evaluation methods for the accessibility of the regional market, the methods being based on the Euclidian distance calculating tools and cluster analysis. The distance between the regions was found by the geographic coordinates – latitude and longitude – converted into kilometers and was the basis to construct a distance matrix and to calculate the periphery index of the regions in the Russian Federation and Finland, which accounts for the volume of regional market measures by the region’s population size. Thus, periphery index was offered to be calculated on the basis of synthesis of two indicators: geographic location of the regions from one another and the volume of the regional market. The obtained matrix of the distances helped to provide a comparative analysis of the geographic accessibility of the regional markets in the Russian and Finnish regions, their cartographic model was prepared, the model focuses on the regions which are periphery and may find it difficult to enter the market of other regions with their products. The regions in Finland are classified into central, semi-periphery, and periphery ones depending on the periphery index. It has been found that the territorial location of the Finnish regions matches the classical scheme of regions location by groups under W. Christaller’s approach “center-periphery”: remote regions are periphery, the regions closer to the central part are central ones. The Russian Federation regions are reasonably divided into central, semi-central, semi-periphery, and periphery, which is due to a greater geographic area. It has been revealed that the Russian regions show a significant gap in the periphery index. For example, the remote regions of the Far Eastern Federal District with their periphery index from 4000 to 8500 refer to the periphery regions. At the same time, some near-border regions go to the group of semi-central regions because geographically they are accessible for other regional markets, and the index periphery ranges from 1610 to 3000 (the Republic of Karelia, Leningrad Oblast). The development of the evaluation method to analyze the accessibility of the regional market of near-border territories and the results of its testing is theoretically and practically valuable since they expand methodological tools aimed to study the role of geographic location in the regions, economic development and could be applied to develop the strategies of inter-regional, trans-border, and international cooperation of the Russian Federation. Further research is connected with the justification and development of strategy for the international relationship between the near-border regions with regard to the accessibility of these regional markets, as well as identification of a set of measures of management impacts aimed to smooth out the differentiation level of the Russian economic space.