Current issues in the development of municipal entities and in reforming the institution of local self-government

The goal of the present article is to evaluate the trends and identify key problems in the socio-economic development of municipal entities and in the development of local self-government, and to identify ways to solve the most acute of them. We consider trends in the development of municipal entities in their relation with the processes of reforming local self-government; the analysis uses not only statistics, but also the results of a local self-government monitoring held in the Vologda Oblast since 2007 in the form of a questionnaire survey of heads of municipalities. This distinguishes our present work from similar works of other scholars and forms its scientific novelty. To achieve our goal we used such scientific methods as economic, statistical and comparative analysis, generalization, expert survey, and a monographic method. We have found out that the main problems that impede efficient management of development of municipal entities are as follows: flaws in the legislation regulating the development of local self-government; lack of own revenue sources and insufficient financial support from the state; low efficiency of interaction with public authorities; lack of complete and reliable information on the socio-economic development of the municipality; non-involvement of the local population; limited powers of local self-government bodies in the sphere of economic development of the territory. We prove that local self-government institution in Russia is being continuously reformed, and the reforms do not address a key problem of municipalities - their low economic and financial independence. Thus, in 2014-2017, appropriate decisions were made at the federal level, according to which the number of issues of local importance of rural settlements were significantly reduced; the issues concerning the choice of the procedure of forming local self-government bodies are now handled at the regional level; now there exists the possibility of actually converting municipal districts to urban districts. We prove that all this only undermines the role of local self-government institution. We propose recommendations to eliminate possible negative effects of this reform. The results of our study can be used in the work of relevant federal and regional authorities, and serve as a basis for further research on this topic in the area of designing organizational and financial-economic foundations for the functioning of local self-government institution.