Territorial planning and Zipf's law

Territorial planning is an integral part of strategic planning in accordance with the current legislation of the Russian Federation. When development strategies are elaborated, the assessment of the socio-economic situation in the region should be based on the results obtained in the course of studying the current situation in a constituent entity of the Russian Federation in comparison with its border territorial entities, as well as in comparison with indicators in the macroregion (federal district). SWOT analysis is the most common technology for assessing the situation in a region. Due to various reasons the use of this method does not provide high accuracy of the result. The use of the Zipf distribution (inversely proportional dependence) as a reference provides an opportunity for a more accurate quantitative analysis of the dynamics of indicators used to assess the socio-economic situation in territorial entities. The goal of the paper is to determine current external conditions, trends and imbalances in the socio-economic situation in a region with the use of Zipf's law. In contrast to the traditional use of the law in the study of demographic indicators, our paper aims to consider the dynamics of changes in gross regional product and in the number of jobs. The results indicate that the distribution of the value added and the distribution of number of jobs tend to an inversely proportional function. The discussion of the results is presented in the form of a discussion on the impact of socio-economic situation on the formation of long-term development plans; the discussion takes into account the positions of constituent entities of the Russian Federation on the Zipf curve. In addition, we substantiate the possibility and necessity of using the gross regional product indicator in the conditions of the Russian Federation. Our conclusions show the advantage of using distributions to study the existing external environment in a constituent entity of the Russian Federation. Practical application of Zipf's law helps define the starting conditions and forecast the consequences of implementation of socio-economic development strategies more accurately and to substantiate quantitative indicators for long-term plans.