Methodological Approaches to Regions’ Typology for Working out the Strategy of Russia’s Spatial Development

The article is dedicated to the overview of new methodological approaches towards the typology of Russian regions developed to support the locality-based decisions at the federal level of governance in order to design and implement the Spatial Development Strategy of the Russian Federation in the long-term. Drawing evidence from several examples illustrating the formation of different regional typologies the authors propose their own one taking into the account the core principles of Russian State Regional Policy and the aims of Spatial Development Strategy which were formulated in its Conception. Giving the current conditions which indicate a necessity for a radical improvement of spatial development governance system, the research proposes a number of criteria towards the typology of Russian regions. The authors propose the measures for the system of criteria for social and economic indicators that can be used to generate homogeneous groups of regions on the basis of subdividing the regions under analysis into corresponding groups within the development of sectoral and industrial or problem focuses typology. For the creation of a structural and sectoral typology of the regions, the indices of the share of specific types of the economic activity in the structure of GDP in the total volume of the shipped goods into the manufacturing plants are used. The results of such a 2D-typology of Russian regions when using a structural, industrial and problem-focused typologies made on the basis of the official statistical data issued by the Rosstat over the period 2014-2016 are provided. The main approaches to their use at the determination of priorities of perspective social and economic development of the regions of the Russian Federation are given.