Factors of Uneven Development of Russian Cities with Population of over 100 000 People in the First Decades of the 21st Century

The study is devoted to assessing the scale, dynamics and factors of uneven development of Russian cities with a population of more than 100 thous. people by key socioeconomic indicators in 2000–2021. The assessment was carried out using the Theil index and its decomposability property and was based on Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) data. The results make it possible to clearly identify the stage of a general decrease in socioeconomic differences between cities during the period of economic growth before the crisis of 2009–2010 and the stage of growing differences during this crisis, while in the 2010s the trends of interurban inequality became multidirectional and unstable. It is shown that macroeconomic crises have a short-term, significant, but diverse impact on the inequality of large cities by key parameters. A significant gap between Moscow and St. Petersburg from other cities has been confirmed while measured with indicators comparable to ones of municipal statistics; the enormous scale of the contribution of these cities to the overall scale of inequality of large centers is shown. It has been revealed that the differentiation of large cities by most socioeconomic characteristics is most significantly influenced by the factor of geographical (primarily macroregional) position, and in recent years macroregional differences between large centers have increased. At the same time there is no stable significant impact of specialization on the differentiation of cities—this factor makes sense in ensuring the differences of cities only by wages, while its contribution in interurban differences by other economic indicators is manifested only in certain years and is closely associated with industry cycles. The decrease in the differentiating role of the regional capital status over the past decades has been proved simultaneously with the growth of the population factor role, which confirms the increasing influence of agglomeration effects. An important result is that the impact on interurban differences by a number of indicators turns out to be insignificant for all the factors that are considered to be key, which means that the competition of large centers is much more complicated than it is commonly believed.

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