Russian tourism during the COVID-19: assessing effect of stimulating domestic demand for the country and regions’ economy

The COVID-19 pandemic has struck the tourism industry all over the world significantly reducing industry’s revenue and number of jobs. It has had a negative impact on the global economy. In Russia, the tourism sector was one of the most affected areas due to the quarantine restrictions that made the government take several supporting measures to mitigate the coronavirus effects and restore demandfor tourist services. It actualizes the problem of assessing economic effects after stimulating consumption of tourism goods and services, as well as identifying and justifying the development directions of Russian tourism in unfavorable epidemiological situation and global economic turbulence which became the purpose of our work. The scientific novelty of the research is to determine, on the basis of inter-sectoral modeling, the effect for the Russian economy from the implementation of the program of subsidizing domestic tourist trips - so-called tourist cashback. The results of the study have identified the importance of stimulating population’s demand for recreation within the country for economy and have found the territorial disparity problem in the distribution of the increase in gross output caused by Russian tourist’s consumption growth. As for the research methodological base, the author uses general scientific methods of analysis, synthesis, comparison, generalization, and tools based on input-output analysis methodology. Information base includes the works of domestic and foreign scientists dealing with tourism development problems in the post-crisis period, the assessment of its impact on economic parameters, as well as information from state statistics authorities, data from the World Bank, the World Tourism Organization, and the Russian Public Opinion Research Center. The prospects for future studies are related to designing regional tourism development areas that contribute to the increase in population’s consumption volume of tourist products and growing competitiveness of the latter.