«Collective Prediction» as a by-Product of Regional Strategic Planning

The paper analyses the quality of strategies of socio-economic development for regions of Russia. It also considers the perspectives opened by these strategies being available for regional research, namely, for evaluating the appropriateness of optimistic expectations and the reasonability of regions' economic growth forecasts. The article creates a growth forecast for Russia's economy from isolated regional forecasts, estimates its basic parameters and represents it as an outcome of «collective prediction» of regions that is to be verified. This empirical study is based on the available strategies of socio-economic development of the subjects of the Russian Federation up to 2020-2030. The method includes the following steps: collection and systematization of strategies' forecasts; transformation of expected outcomes of strategies into compatible indicators and their consolidation across federal districts; comparative analysis of the consolidated forecasts with the all-round forecast of Russia's economic development, made on the basis of a multiregional input-output model. It is revealed that optimistic growth forecasts for the GRP may often be overestimated and not coordinated with investment forecasts. In order to evaluate the achievability of forecasted regional economic development indices, we used a spatial input-output model that is capable to produce a forecast in view of resource constraints, interregional and intersectoral interactions on the scale of the national economy. Moderate forecasts are inherent mostly in highly developed regions. Excessive optimistic projections over a balanced forecast may serve as an indicator of interregional competition for investment. Scarcity of labor is evaluated by comparing consolidated regional demographic forecasts with the official demographic forecast by the Russian Federal State Statistics Service