Problems of Elaboration of Spatial Development Strategy of the Russian Federation

The paper analyzes the problems encountered during elaboration of the spatial development strategy of the Russian Federation and reducing the effectiveness of state policy in this area. A significant improvement in the quality of governing over spatial development sphere requires solving a number of issues, including setting up the statistical foundation; publishing the statistical data on federal and regional budgets and improving its transparency; establishment of official methods of defining urban agglomeration; increasing the quality of municipal statistics as a whole. Several issues require extensive expert discussion. Among them are mostly those concerning macroregions: how important is decreasing territorial disparities at the level of macroregions; what is the point of defining macroregions and creating the strategies of their socio-economic development; how fast can the difference between regions grow as long as the less developed regions maintain high rates of development. At the federal level, there is a prevalent desire to make decisions ‘from above’ ignoring development ‘from below’. One example of such attitude are the perspective economic specializations of the regions. This issue should be solved in the framework of state investment policy, during decision-making on providing state support to investment projects in certain territories