Modern ways to boost economic growth in regions

The paper reviews Russian and foreign research on modern ways to boost regional economic growth on the example of regional development institutions. We have chosen project management and regional development agencies as the most promising institutions for regional development. The growing interest in project management is confirmed by the data of the international database ScienceDirect, in which the number of articles on this topic for 1996-2019 was 19.5 thousand, and their annual number has increased 3.8-fold during this period. There is a similar trend in Russia: according to the electronic library eLIBRARY.RU the number of articles on this topic for the period from 2000 to 2019 has increased 87.5-fold, and their total number for this period was 1.2 thousand. Our main research method is cross-country comparative analysis. We investigate advantages and disadvantages of project financing on the examples of the Sydney Opera House (Australia), the Olympic Stadium in Montreal (Canada), the Concorde supersonic airliner (France-UK), the Suez Canal (Egypt), the Hubble Space Telescope (USA-EU), the Humber Bridge (UK). While studying international experience of regional development agencies, we have classified them into three types: agencies for ensuring regional leveling within the country (Scotland, Australia, Canada); agencies for ensuring economic leveling within an international association of countries (EU-Poland, Romania, Portugal); agencies that help countries join the world’s leading nations on the basis of the innovative economy (China, Malaysia, Botswana). A summary analysis of the works that study the activities of regional development agencies has allowed us to present the institutions under consideration on a system-wide basis and to identify their weak and strong points that should be taken into account in the development of this tool that helps enhance economic growth in Russia’s regions.