Far Eastern Russia as a Macro Region: The Infrastructure Aspect

‘Strategy for Spatial Development of Russian Federation as far as 2030’ states that the classification of the country’s macro regions is carried out by categorizing certain groups of Russian Federation constituent member territories under these spatial entities following the economic and geographical, physiographic, economic and infrastructure criteria. Among economists the approach to the formation of the macro-regional structure of the country is based mainly on economic criteria and this approach relies on the analysis of the functioning regional, interregional and international markets of products and services in the examined spatial entities. At the same time, all other criteria go into the background. The article addresses the need to observe also other criteria in the spatial organization of the country, the infrastructure ones in particular. These criteria make it sometimes possible to drastically adjust the conclusions made in the course of assessment relying only on economic criteria. The article provides a brief survey of foreign experience with the so-called ‘infrastructural regionalism’ to identify methodological approaches to the infrastructural regional classification. It is concluded that at present there are no sufficiently scientifically proven practical methods. The author confines himself to the rationale that Far Eastern Russia is yet a macro region if its formation processes are assessed following the infrastructure criteria. This standpoint contradicts the assertions of experts who substantiate their argument on the basis of economic criteria for the Far-Eastern Russia macro region