Socio-economic development of regions of the Russian Federation: disintegration and demographic compression

The article provides a statistical analysis of the dynamics of spatial disintegration of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation. The increasing trend of disunity was especially evident during the period of economic reforms and the weakening of the regulatory and connecting role of the state, which led to the emergence of a strong asymmetry in the internal and external relations of the regions. Factors that reduce the coherence of the economic space and its quality create threats to the integrity of the state as a whole. An analysis of the statistics of trade relations between the constituent entities of the Russian Federation shows their low involvement in interregional exchange for both food and non-food groups of goods. A study of the structure of exports and imports reveals that in exported goods there are mainly products of the initial production stages, and in imported ones there is a high degree of processing, which indicates the unresolved raw material orientation of the Russian economy. Analysis of cargo transportation and cargo turnover shows the insignificant involvement of many regions in domestic trade turnover and the need for integration into the internal economic space. Along with the current disintegration of the economic space of the Russian Federation, the problem of population decline is acute. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the government and the president have been taking measures to improve the dynamics of natural population growth and reduce the outflow of population in the eastern part of the country. It was possible to change the dynamics of natural growth only in 2012, when for the first time the number of births exceeded the number of deaths per thousand people. After 2017, the birth rate began to decline again, and since 2020, demographic compression has intensified due to the pandemic of the new coronavirus infection Covid-19. The demographic situation is different in different districts, but the outflow of population from Siberia and the Far East has not yet been overcome.