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The article studies consolidated budget revenues of Russia’s constituent entities. The purpose of our research is to analyze how the pandemic impacts the dynamics of sub-federal budget revenues and to assess contributions from various sources (tax, non-tax revenues, gratuitous receipts, and their components) to their change. From the data on moving annual totals for sub-federal budgets and their components with a one-month shift, we construct linear time regressions for 86 constituent entities of the Russian Federation from 2015 till March 2020. They are used to forecast non-pandemic revenues of local budgets during the pandemic (April 2020 till June 2021). By decomposing deviations of the actual revenues from the forecast ones, we determine the contribution of different sources to changes in local budget revenues amid COVID-19. The entities of the Ural Federal District and a few other oil-producing regions showed the greatest vulnerability to the pandemic. At the same time, an abnormally high growth in budget revenues was observed in some regions of the Far Eastern Federal District. Tax revenues had the greatest negative impact on the change in sub-federal budget revenues, where income tax provided most losses. Smaller disbenefits were associated with corporate property tax and special tax regimes. Personal income tax partially compensated for their shortfall. The change in taxes on goods and services was extremely uneven. Non-tax budget revenues followed tax ones, and the use of state property and sale of assets generated the largest losses. Interbudgetary transfers compensated for both the shortfall in own revenues and the growing regional expenditures. Their distribution reveals three motives: pandemic mitigation, regulation of interregional imbalances, and political preferences. Entities of the North Caucasian Federal District and some other lagging republics received a large fraction of additional transfers. Their structure is marked by a significant increase in the share of subsidies and other interbudgetary transfers, which reflected the state’s active participation in national projects and creating public goods. A decrease in the share of equalization grants implies a reduction in non-targeted aid allocated in accordance with uniform rules. This testifies to the state’s ever-growing dirigiste function in the economy. The results obtained are applicable to governing budgetary revenues in Russian regions, as well as regulating interbudgetary relations during crises.

The article is a scientific review to summarize the results of existing international and domestic studies on the development peculiarities and patterns typical of Russian regions during and after crises. It shows that the theoretical basis for studying this issue is the regional resilience concept, which has been rapidly evolving in foreign research since the 2010s, and analyzes its features in relation to regional growth theories and economic security studies. The factors influencing the regional resilience to economic crises are summarized as follows: features of the regional settlement system (urban to rural population ratio) and their place in the settlement system (position in relation to large urban agglomerations), the structure of regional economy (degree of its diversification, specialization, and employment structure), innovation potential and quality of human capital, cohesion of local communities, and quality of public administration. We discuss the stability of differences between regions in terms of their resilience, including how the features of regions’ spatial development in the current COVID-induced crisis are compliant with previously identified patterns, as well as the negative consequences of crises as regional divergence and a reduced inclusiveness of economic growth. The article examines ways to transform the state policy of spatial development during crises and possibilities of managing regional resilience.

Growing since the early 1990s, the heterogeneity of Russia’s Asian regions in terms of economic activity has reached high levels. Today, the economic space of Asian Russia is largely polarized, and the degree of socio-economic inequality in the regions of Asian Russia exceeds the degree of inequality in those of its European part. The purpose of this study is to analyze the polarization process in the regions of Asian Russia by economic activity indicators in 2000-2019 and to obtain extrapolation forecasts of economic activity distribution there in the long run. The study relies on methods of analyzing distribution dynamics, using the theory of Markov random processes with discrete time and continuous state space. The application of these methods made it possible to achieve the following: assess the actual distribution of indicators of economic activity in the regions of Asian Russia at the beginning and end of the period under consideration and conclude about its increasing polarization; obtain an extrapolation forecast of economic activity distribution in the regions in the long run, i.e., a forecast of long-term spatial equilibrium; identify and characterize groups of regions forming “convergence clubs" in the long run. The analysis suggests that the capacity to further intensify economic space polarization is not yet exhausted. If the current trends persist, the identified “clubs" of regions will become more dissimilar. The study’s findings should be considered when deciding upon regional policy measures.

One of the key factors in the socio-economic development of the region is higher innovation activity. There exist many methodological approaches to the study of regional innovation subsystems. However, the problems of their development have not been sufficiently covered from the point of view of the internal content of the innovation process in the region. According to the authors, a regional innovation subsystem should be considered from the standpoint of the continuity and effectiveness of the innovation process. This allows for the convergence of the resource-oriented approach to the formation of the elements in a subsystem and the process approach to its development. The proposed process-resource approach is based on the following idea. Long-term effective development of a regional innovation subsystem is only possible under the condition of the innovation process continuity, related to the sufficiency of resource provision and the effectiveness of its every stage.

The paper presents the results of an empirical analysis of changes in transportation behavior of Saint Petersburg and Beijing residents that occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The research is meant to identify the factors that had the greatest impact on citizens’ transportation behavior during the pandemic in Saint Petersburg and Beijing. Based on the residents’ survey data, we find out that similar quarantine measures had different effectiveness in the two cities, depending on characteristics of transportation behavior that city dwellers exhibited. The research methodology involves the analysis of open data, as well as of descriptive statistics on the primary data. Our deductions can be used while designing urban transportation policy aimed at changing the characteristics of citizens’ transportation behavior, including quarantine regulations. The main conclusion of the study is that the effectiveness of quarantine measures taken by the city authorities depends to a large extent on citizens’ behavioral pattern developed before the pandemic.

The article analyzes the problem of European and Asian Russia railways development as a dual-use system: 1) as a basic element in the economic development of Siberian and Far Eastern territories, still having focal development, and 2) as military-strategic communications in case the collective West attempts to shift from the “cold" to the “hot war" methods against Russia, specifically in the Arctic regions therein and the adjacent waters of the Arctic and Pacific oceans. Our objects of analysis are options for the organizational design of the country’s railroad transportation, which arise from the choice of a large-scale project as an implementation priority in macroregions east of the Urals. A group of experts evaluates these options at a pre-investment feasibility stage, supported by a specially designed software system. The proposed apparatus for assessing and selecting the most preferable organizational design in the long term has been tested for efficiency and adaptability to the existing practice of making complex investment decisions at the macrolevel under uncertainty.

The article presents the case-study of flotation of fluorite ore from Kamarposht mine, Iran. The flotation tests allowed optimization of consumption of chemical reagents. The recommended process conditions enable production of flotation concentrate at fluorite content of 61.4 % and fluorite recovery of 85.88 %.

The main objectives of this study are to determine the highly productive aquifer zones using the GIS-integrated vulnerability technique and to assess the protection of these productive zones from the pollution sources such as industrial and residential areas nearby a river system. This study was performed in Kucuk Menderes River Basin (KMRB) located in the western part of Turkey, which has a significant groundwater potential and includes highly productive agricultural land and some of the largest industrial establishments. According to the results, the western part of the study area has notably high aquifer potential used by industrial and residential areas, whereas the eastern part of the study area has lower aquifer potential used by productive agricultural land. However, urbanization and industrial areas are expanding in high groundwater potential zones. It means that regional water resources will be at great risk in terms of quantity and quality. Therefore, this study is aimed in assisting both the determination of protection zones in the main aquifer system and to help planning the future site selection of land use for the river basin.

In this study, a miner monitoring system is designed using the Deep Learning (DL) approach and the IoT technology together. It is aimed to determine the area where the miners are located while a possible accident occurs by the proposed system. Experiments were carried out to analyze the effectiveness of the proposed system and the performance evaluations were made. The best result was obtained with an accuracy rate of 97.14%. This rate indicates that the designed miner monitoring system can be used effectively in practice.

The R&D project on the novel method and facilities for ground control is presented. The relevant literature and advanced design efforts are comprehensively reviewed. A simple design of an optical fiber displacement sensor is proposed. Its cardinal difference from the monitoring systems currently in operation in coal mines is the use of a single mode fiber as a sensitive element. The new hardware and software system improves ground control and enhances safety of mining. The geotechnical condition of roadways is identified by means of comparison of light spot apertures.