Infrastructure for Science and Innovation in the Federal Subjects of Russia

Innovation infrastructure is one of the key elements of the technology transfer process. In Russia, at the government level, great attention is paid to the construction of new infrastructure, but an appropriate framework for its effectiveness evaluation has not been sufficiently developed. In recent years the government has tried out various forms of support for innovation through infrastructure developments, many of which have demonstrated lack of viability in the absence of government subsidies. In the course of the inspection of large-scale projects Supervisory bodies have also discovered the fragmentation and inconsistency of the state policy aimed at construction of regional research infrastructure complexes. The efficiency of local innovation systems is a subject of interest for academic economists. Many rankings are intended to explicitly indicate the comparative advantages of some subjects of the Russian Federation over the others in many different aspects. Another line of research relevant to the problem is Regression Modeling. Based on the knowledge production function, Russian researchers studied the dependence of the innovative output in the Russian regions on a large number of factors, including human capital, research funding, productivity of applied research, etc. Despite the impressive number of such works, significance of the innovative infrastructure has remained outside the focus of attention. This paper presents the estimates for panel data regression model, which has shown a positive relationship between the presence of innovative territorial cluster and the growth of innovative products. However, under this approach no evidence has been obtained for a positive impact of special economic zones and regional development corporations on regional innovation complexes.