Asian Russia – Conditions for and Obstacles to Progressive Diversification of Macroregional Economy

The paper considers the peculiarities and directions of economy diversification processes in the eastern part of Russia – the territory that stretches from the Urals to the Pacific Ocean. The processes of diversification are reviewed through the prism of not only the views and approaches developed within the framework of modern evolutionary economic geography but also institutional economics. It is shown that the state and dynamics of diversification processes in the Asian Russia are determined by the peculiarities of the transformation of the country’s economy as a whole during the transition from the system of centralized planning and management to a system based on market principles of interaction between economic agents. The role and importance of previously formed assets and implemented solutions – especially in the infrastructure sphere and previously created production structures – are extremely high. Without taking into account the peculiarities of space – the significant distances between different productions that are links in the value chain – the transformation of the economy leads to a narrowing of the spheres of economic activity and subsequent de-industrialization. According to the authors, the transition to the evolutionary process of economic diversification of the vast macroregion is impossible without a balanced public industrial policy and policy in the field of nature and subsoil use. The analysis of the processes of diversification / de-industrialization is supplemented and expanded within the framework of the cognitive analysis of possible directions and conditions affecting them. The authors offer a set of fundamental measures and steps, that allow, in their opinion, moving from ‘extra-regional’ causes of diversification to augmenting the role and importance of local and internal factors and conditions