Information and Communication Technologies in the Regions of Russia: Comparative Analysis

Abstract

—The issue under study is pressing due to the high importance of information and communication technologies for the future of Russia that establishes new requirements for priorities in regional development strategy. The role and importance of information and communication technologies for the development of Russian economy are defined. The problem of imbalance in territorial economy structure which is typical for Russia as a multi-regional economic system leads to the need for a comparative analysis of regions in terms of development level and using information and communication technologies. The multivariance of studied process requires using special methods which include cluster analysis used by the authors; it is one of the methods of multivariate statistics and reflects the features of multivariance during the procedure of classifying objects. Clustering procedure was performed by the authors on the basis of hierarchical agglomerative methods using Euclidean distance between objects and farthest neighbor method in order to calculate the distance between clusters. In addition, the stability of obtained clustering results was checked using k-Means, Centroid, and Median methods. In order to get a dynamic clustering picture, we compared the results of dividing regions into clusters according to statistics from 2014 and 2017. Additionally, a comparative analysis of the regions was carried out according to the level of development of information and communication technologies based on the integrated comparison parameter developed by the authors.