Analysis of Fiscal Capacity of Russian Regions: Approaches and Conclusions

The article analyzes the budget revenues of federal subjects of Russia in constant prices for the 2012–2021 period. Regions with the largest and smallest volumes of tax and nontax revenues, as well as nonreciprocal transfers, are identified. To assess the direction of the federal government’s budget policy, the dynamics of a number of statistical indicators were studied, including tax and nontax revenues, total receipts and transfers calculated per capita. In addition, the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient was calculated, which made it possible to analyze the relationship between regional revenues with and without federal transfers. The results of the regression analysis show that the key goal of budget policy is to reduce interregional disparities in the structure of revenue of federal subjects. However, in order to increase the regions’ interest in increasing tax revenues, it is necessary to expand their tax powers. Given that the list of regions with the lowest volumes of tax and nontax revenues remained virtually unchanged during the study period, there is a need to review the effectiveness of the current mechanism for distributing transfers.