Classification, problems and prospects for rural territory development

Mostof the Russian territory is rural (territories beyond urban settlements),where 26% of the population dwell. Despite the fact that these territories perform important national functions (food security, preservation of spatial connectivity, historical and cultural heritage, maintaining environmental balance, creating conditions for restoring health and recreation, etc.) their development has cause a lotof systemic problems to accumulate (significant population decline, poor development and destruction of production and infrastructure, etc.). Moreover, there is no comprehensive and systematic state policy of rural territories development. Rural territories differ significantly in natural, geographical, demographic, and economic parameters. And not in all of them the main activity is agriculture. In this regard, it is important to analyze the features and problems of rural development (on the example of constituent entities of the Northwestern federal district), as well as to determine the directions of their development in the long term, which is the purpose of the present paper. In the course of the research we propose the classification of rural territories (municipal units with predominant rural population) of the Northwestern federal district subjects according to criteria of periphery and economic profile. We identify the main intra-regional and intra-district features of their development and propose specific directions and development tools for each type, which makes up the scientific novelty of the work. To achieve this goal, we apply scientific methods such as economic, statistical, and comparative analysis, methods of generalization and expert survey, monographic method. It is demonstrated that the most developed are municipal units with agro-industrial profile (their share in constituent entities of the Northwestern federal district - 18%); rather high parameters are also characteristic of mining territories (9%); the least developed are territories of depressive agro-industrial type (26%). The research results can be applied in activities of the federal and regional authorities and serve as a framework for further research into this subject concerning the improvement of the mechanism of rural development management.