Reorganization of Resource Supplying Enterprises in Regional Markets in the Housing and Utilities Sector: Problems and Data Analysis

The research purpose is to reveal, based on the analysis of data for 2016–2023, the the trends and problem of reorganizing resource supplying enterprises in regional markets in the public utilities sector which is aimed at ensuring the industry’s recovery from the permanent financial crisis. A brief description of the reasons hindering the progressive development of the industry is provided. Both in research works and in the sphere of public utilities regulation, it is widely believed that the lack of competition and the widespread use of state and municipal unitary resource supplying enterprises (natural monopolies) is one of the main factors for the current situation. The authors show that this provision is debatable: it is reasonably defended by the Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Russian Federation and challenged by local authorities. The article is devoted to studying the dynamics of the natural monopolies share in the total volume of resource supply in regional utilities markets. Special attention is paid to the issue of the statistical interdependence of this indicator and the level of regulated tariffs for the period from 2016 to 2023. It has been found that over this period, most regions did not reduce, but increased the share of natural monopolies in the total volume of utilities supply. The most frequent (modal) increase in the share of natural monopolies in the areas of heat supply, cold water supply and sanitation amounted to almost 6% of the total market volume. This result was demonstrated by more than 60 out of 85 regions of the Russian Federation. At the same time, statistical interdependence between the degree of markets monopolization and the levels of regulated tariffs has not been revealed. High degree of differentiation of regional tariffs for public utilities, as well as their significant deviation from the average Russian level are explained by geographical, resource, natural and climatic regional differences, as well as specific features of the existing network infrastructure of the utilities sector rather than by the presence of unitary enterprises. The authors conclude that the organizational and legal form of a unitary enterprise in itself does not exclude the possibility of effective economic activity. At the same time, it is advisable to clarify at the legislative level the criteria for the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of municipal unitary enterprises/state unitary enterprises to support the adoption of economically sound decisions on their restructuring.