Institutional Effects and Innovative Development of Russian Regions

Abstract

The heterogeneity of the national socio-economic space implies the assessment of regional peculiarities of innovation activity responses to localized sets of various resources that contribute to its activation. One of the most important elements in the composition of these sets of resources is the institutional conditions in the respective territory, the diversity of which at a given degree of technological and economic development can bear different results. These assumptions served as the basis for the present study, the purpose of which is to substantiate the manifestation of various institutional effects arising in Russian regions and to assess their impact on innovative development. In this study, the authors understand institutional factors as scientific and educational potential, the level of bureaucracy as one of the consequences of the local specificity of managerial impacts, the level of criminality, and entrepreneurial activity. The subject of the study is institutional effects resulting from the action of institutional factors affecting the innovative development of Russian regions. The aim is to assess the influence of institutional effects, i.e. scientific and educational environment, entrepreneurial, criminogenic, and bureaucratic, on the level of innovative development of regions. Panel data on 83 subjects of the Russian Federation for the period between the years 2000 and 2020 were used as the information basis. The peculiarity of the study is the use of the quantile regression method. The results of the study reveal positive influence of the effects of scientific and educational environment, and entrepreneurship and negative influence of the bureaucratic effect for all groups of regions. The inverse U-shaped relation between the criminogenic effect and innovation activity was confirmed for 80% of regions. It was found that the quality of institutions and the development of small entrepreneurship are more significant for regions with a low level of innovation activity than for regions that are innovation leaders. © 2023 The Author(s).