Economics of Federal Relations Execution Cannot Be Pardoned

Interest in the problems of territorial development has a long history. And although the forms of territorial administration have evolved, its strategic goals have remained unchanged – using the potential of the regions to solve national and local problems. But “immutability of goals” is not “immutability of mechanisms”. And this fact was once again confirmed by the short recent history of Russia. At first, the eyes of the scientific community and practitioners were turned to the mechanisms of transition to a system of federal relations different from the Soviet one. Then, the problem began to be considered in the context of the search for an optimum between centralization and decentralization in the system of state territorial administration. Today, against the background of the rejection of the unconditional priority of the liberal model of economic development and the recognition of the importance of strategic planning, there is a rejection of the policy of developing a federal form of national statehood in favor of its unitary form. In the opinion of many, this drew a line under the long-standing discussion about the prospects of the Russian model of federalism. However, even if we interpret what is happening in this way, the search for mechanisms to overcome differences in the levels of socio-economic development of regions remains relevant, research continues to specify the measure of responsibility of authorities and administrations of the subjects of the Federation for the development of regional economies, and the search for ways to improve the model of inter-budgetary relations is far from complete. And since these and other tasks have long been proposed to be solved within the framework of the development of a federal form of national statehood, it remains to be seen how much better they can be handled by implementing, in fact, a unitary state regional policy. Therefore, there are grounds to assert that the scientific field “economics of federal relations” has not exhausted its potential. The article attempts to substantiate this point of view.