Analysis of trends in foreign trade of the Chelyabinsk region

Elimination of a gap between the levels of social and economic development of national economy entities is one of basic tasks of the Russian regional policy. As foreign trade is the factor stimulating economic growth of regional economy, its transparent assessment may allow to develop competent and balanced social-and-economic policy which may help solve the existing problems. This article is devoted to the analysis and specifics of foreign trade of the Chelyabinsk Region, identification and assessment of the factors influencing the foreign trade, and to studying of the current tendencies. In this work structural and dynamic analysis of indicators of the foreign trade for 2006-2015 is carried out. The applied technique is based on assessment of commodity and geographical structures of the export and import, calculation of indexes of structural changes, cost indexes, entropy of the export and import sectors of the economy. The international commodity speciali-zation of the Chelyabinsk Region is defined, assessment of the structural commodity changes is carried out, the risks of the developed tendency are revealed. The dependency of dynamics of the foreign trade flows on the economic growth of the partner countries is investigated.