Economic Security of Russia's Regions: Resilience of Production-Investment Regimes and Diagnosis of Reproduction Risks

Abstract

The objective of the study is to substantiate and test the regime approach to diagnosing reproduction risks of economic security in Russian regions based on a joint analysis of industrial dynamics, investment activity and the state of fixed assets. The main results of the study: the approaches to assessing regional economic security used in the scientific literature were analyzed and the limitations of integral and threshold models in terms of the substantive interpretation of production and investment imbalances were identified; a comparison of the industrial production index, the index of physical volume of investment in fixed capital and the degree of depreciation of fixed assets was carried out for 85 constituent entities of the Russian Federation for 2024; the absence of a statistically significant one-year relationship between industrial and investment dynamics was established, for which the Pearson correlation coefficient was -0.074 at p = 0.502; four production and investment regimes were identified, while in 30 regions a divergence in the directions of changes in industrial production and investment was recorded; dynamic testing of the proposed approach was carried out on a panel of ten different types of regions for 2015-2024. It was established that a one-year investment lag does not produce a stable statistical effect on subsequent industrial dynamics. The influence of the accumulated two-year production-investment gap was tested; its statistical signal was revealed in individual specifications and proved sensitive to the inclusion of regional and time effects. A concept for regime diagnostics was developed, taking into account the duration of the misalignment, the direction of transitions between regimes, and the correspondence of investment flows to the industrial specialization of the territory. Finally, it is concluded that the stability of the production-investment regime, combined with the dynamics of depreciation of fixed assets and the sectoral focus of capital investments, provides meaningful diagnostic information. The obtained results develop a toolkit for assessing the reproductive risks of regional economic security and can be used to improve systems for monitoring the sustainability of regional development.