Sustainable development of single-industry towns in Siberia and the Russian Far East: what is the price of regional economic growth?

Abstract

One of the most well-known and relatively easy to compute integral indicators of sustainable development is the indicator of genuine savings. In the present article the emphasis is made on the modifications of the method of genuine savings calculation for the level of municipal units on the example of single-industry towns (monotowns) of Siberia and the Russian Far East. This choice of the object of the study is conditioned by the hypothesis that it is municipalities that experience most of the environmental and social consequences of economic growth in regions. The enterprises’ reports gave rise to the database, which was then used to calculate the genuine savings values of Siberian and Far Eastern single-industry towns. The result is a new classification of single-industry towns, which includes four clusters allocated depending on the level of genuine savings, industry of specialization and population. The new approach to the classification of singleindustry towns can be used by regional and municipal authorities to form a differentiated policy for the sustainable development. The analysis of the average genuine savings of different towns by region has shown that even if the region as a whole is characterized by quite high values of genuine savings, the towns, in which there are real enterprises that yield most of the gross domestic product of the country, experience negative values of genuine savings and are often on the verge of environmental or social disaster.