Current Issues of Urban Agglomerations Development: New Spatial Priorities and Budgetary Aspect

The subject is urban agglomerations in the Russian Federation in new spatial priorities, taking into account current issues of inter-budgetary relations formation. The relevance of the work is confirmed by the recognition of urban agglomerations as a spatial priority, the approval of their list, which makes it possible to assess the scale and coverage of urban agglomerations, link them with the budgetary aspect of their development, and form recommendations for improving inter-budgetary relations. The purpose of the work is to conduct a comparative analysis of the new spatial development strategy with the previous strategy in terms of the main provisions governing the development of urban agglomerations, as well as to quantify the parameters of urban agglomerations, identify trends and formulate proposals for the development of inter-budgetary relations between municipalities (regions) that form urban agglomerations. The study revealed that the unified list of “strongholds” includes 76 urban agglomerations, accumulating about 50% of the country’s population. It has been established that the new definition of urban agglomerations corresponds to scientific approaches on the need to form a criterion for remoteness from the “core” of the agglomeration. In terms of the budgetary aspect, the authors conclude that, in general, local budgets remain dependent on financial support from higher-level budgets, which hinders the dynamic growth of urban agglomerations. At the same time, the authors believe that the decisions taken on inter-municipal cooperation will have a positive impact on their further development.