STRATEGIC DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT OF AN AGRICULTURE-ORIENTED REGION BY THE CLUSTER APPROACH: CASE OF REGIONS IN THE SOUTH OF RUSSIA

Abstract

: The relevance of this study comes from the fact that the spatial organization of economy in Russia’s regions is going through the definite crisis in the established patterns of territorial localization and operation of the leading branches of economy and their anchor loci. The absence of any efficient response to this crisis results in increased disruption, excessive polarization, and socioeconomic asymmetry of economic space. Regions with agriculture-oriented economy are more sensitive to the uneven development of economic space because they are more dependent on natural and geographical determinants, whereas the focused development of particular zones leads to synchronously formed depressive localities with low basic socioeconomic parameters, despite available resource potential. From this perspective, this article aims to form new approaches to organizing economic space of agriculture-oriented regions, which must be dovetailed with revealing all propulsive economy sectors, zonal and polar forms of economic growth, followed by introduction of various kinds of cluster innovations based on encouraging respective initiatives. The potential of cluster forms of economic space organization is the one that can be spread to vast neighboring territories to form network structures characterized by active socioeconomic development. The modern theoretical methodological basis for managing agriculture-oriented regions by the cluster approach is characterized by deficiency and non-contiguous elaboration of questions related to identifying clusters and their formative prerequisites, making use of particularities and effects of various phases of their lifecycle to improve parameters of socioeconomic territorial development. In addition, there are no advanced developments in polybranch clusterization of economy with the formation of clusterized network economic space. The methodological tools for monitoring and diagnosing cluster formation processes are insufficient. The most efficient method of solving the above specified problem is to form a specialized methodological approach to revealing cluster formation prospects in propulsive sectors of economy. The approach must rely on forming an author system of indices and the expert survey technique. The initiating factor of this study was the theoretical, methodological, and practical pendency of these and many other questions related to the diffusion of cluster innovations in agriculture-oriented regions. The article discloses the essence of the methodological approach to revealing cluster formation prospects in propulsive economic sectors of an agriculture-oriented region. The described method involves calculating nine indices that provide the complete characteristic of the cluster formation capacity on the basis of a particular branch; in the end, this helps formulate the immanent characteristics of the economic sectors of the Stavropol’ kray in the context of cluster formation prospects.