No 3 (2018)

The paper presents various points of view on the concepts of “competitive position” and “competitiveness” including the authors’ point of view. The authors emphasize the methods for assessing the competitive position of a company in the market, and the most relevant of them are: the methods of strategic analysis; the method based on the calculation of the enterprise’s integral index of competitiveness; the method based on the calculation of the coefficient of competitiveness of the products (services).

The study was carried out in the branch of PJSC “Rostelecom” in the Republic of Mordovia – the basic operator of information and communication services in Mordovia. The authors assessed the competitive potential by four areas: business diversification; the universality of communication services; the development of information technology; the innovative projects. The positive dynamics of the company’s performance indicators was revealed. The authors carried out the competitive analysis by the area of activity of “broadband Internet”. The main competitors of the company in the telecommunications market of Mordovia are the following: TTK, Megafon, MTS, and Beeline. The study identified the leader position of the branch of PJSC “Rostelecom” in the Republic of Mordovia against the other regional Internet providers. The authors determined the strengths and the weaknesses of the branch of PJSC “Rostelecom”. The strengths are the company’s reputation, the scale of outreach, and the universality. Low quality of services and inefficient system of the staff incentives were attributed to the weaknesses.

Against the fast-growing market of Internet of things both in the world and in Russia, PJSC “Rostelecom” should assume the role of the industrial business integrator of the industrial Internet, in particular in the most dynamically developing segments “Industrial Internet” and the project “Smart City”. The authors offered the tools for engagement and retention of the customers, developed the recommendations to improve the methods for staff incentive, and proposed the staff evaluation indicators.

The paper considers the issues of ensuring the efficiency of production processes that dominate both at the level of economic entities and at the level of the national economy as a whole. The study identified that the modern electric power industry strives to match the existing development trends. The electric power complex of the Russian Federation was born in the Soviet Union period and the productive potential formed in those times is still being used. During the revival and until 2008, the electric power complex was fully governed by the state, and the plans had generally the prescriptive nature that allowed achieving certain success in the electric power industry. Using the economic-statistical and comparative methods, the author analyzed the capital assets of the electric power complex and, as a result, identified the fall in the efficiency of capital assets and the disequilibrium of the complex as a whole. This fact is manifested in the fall in reliability and continuity of the power supply, as well as in the reduction of innovative activity of the electric power enterprises and the investment revenues in the electric power industry. The identified issues allowed the author to determine the factors influencing the efficiency of capital assets and the system equilibrium which were divided into two groups – the factors of functioning and development of the production capacities of the electric power complex. The study proposes the model of increasing the efficiency of capital assets of the electric power companies that, in the author’s opinion, will allow achieving the fulfillment of the objectives raised before the industry and forming the future potential of the electric power complex.

This paper analyzes the contribution of intangible assets of Russian regions to their economic growth. The gross regional product (GRP) per capita is used as the main indicator of regional economic growth. The testing of models has been carried out based on regional panel data of the Russian Federation from 2005 to 2015 with the use of econometric modeling. The hypothesis is confirmed that there is a constant elasticity of the gross regional product per capita relative to indicators characterizing the degree of use of the main types of intellectual property objects. The high explanatory power of the linear relationship between the abovementioned variables is also econometrically confirmed. It is proved that among all the types of intellectual property used, according to which the Federal Institute of Industrial Property provides quantitative data, a significant influence on the gross regional product is provided by inventions, utility models and databases.

An important result of the study is a high contribution of the variable “Number of used databases” to the explanation of differences in regions, according to their per capita GRP level. It explains about 40 % of fluctuations in the dependent variable. This indicator characterizes the activity of the region in the use of systematized information on the basis of modern software products. It is an important indicator of the digital economy development with digital platforms as one of the key tools using databases to a certain extent.

The construction of regression models over different time intervals proves the strengthening of the influence of innovations on the welfare of the Russian regions. In particular, the variables “Number of inventions used” and “Number of utility models used” have a greater explanatory power in the period of 2010–2015 than in 2005–2010.

In the modern conditions, Russian strategic planning system undergoes significant changes motivated both by the introduction of new factors influencing the development of global economic and social systems and by the innovations in the legislation caused by the entry into force of federal law “Concerning the strategic planning in the Russian Federation” and the subordinate acts associated with it. In this regard, it remains currently important to consider special aspects of the process of transformation of regional strategic planning systems (both as related to the regulatory framework of their functioning specified by the regional legislation and from the perspective of content of the main strategic, forward-looking, planned, and programmatic documents) under the influence of these changes. The paper describes the results of the quality assessment of the system of strategic planning documents formed in the Big Urals regions. At the first stage of the study, for each studied territorial entity of the RF, the revision of availability of the key strategic planning documents of regional level, the development of which is provided by the federal law No. 172-FZ was carried out. At the second stage, the author determined the degree of the conformity of the developed documents to the federal legislation (as related to the main requirements applicable to the informative elements of the documents). At the third stage, the author assessed the conformity of the developed documents to the main elements of the strategic planning system determined in the RF and to each other. The study allowed identifying the degree of adaptation of the Ural regions to the changing conditions (firstly, to the transformation of the normative base of the Russian system) and comparing the RF territorial entities to each other proceeding from the specificity of carrying out the process of modification of the existing system of the strategic planning documents. The identifying of the unconformity of the majority of strategies and prognoses developed in the regions exposed to the diagnostics to the requirements of legislation and the objectives specified in the documents of the upper level became the result of the assessment carried out during the study.

This paper covers the study of such an important part of the regional economic policy as the national economic planning and the methods of its analytical and prognostic substantiation. The author defines the framework for the application and further development of management philosophy of the prognostic work within the system of tools of the society modernization process and pays special attention to the scientifically grounded forecasting preparation of decision-making, which becomes one of the determining factors for the sustainable development of enterprises, industries, complexes, and regions. The author continues the research on the substantiation of tools for monitoring and forecasting of the development of Russian regions on the basis of the creative application and further improvement of basic provisions, and, first of all, the provisions on the unity of forecast and strategy, scientific foresight and active formation of new economic relations at the regional level. The integration scheme of the sustainable development estimated figures in the strategy of economic development of the regional economic systems is proposed. The author substantiates the tools of sustainable development forecasting, among which are the following: the forecasting technique, i.e., the characteristics of the most important methods in their internal interrelation; the application of forecasting techniques to the analysis of the problems of the development of technical and economic systems (forecasting modeling); the estimation of the forecasts’ reliability. The sustainable development of a territory is considered by the author as the technology of the deliberate progress within the society-nature-economy system taking into account the institutional environment. The author proposes the set of indicators for the current situation assessment and the forecasting of a territory from the perspective of sustainable development.