Are Clusters Instrumental for the Development of Industrial Enterprises in Former Planned Economies?

Albeit being a trending topic in the world’s research literature, clusters have not been fully explored in the case of former planned economies with their specific peculiarities. In particular, there is little empirical research on Russian clusters. Therefore, the history of the formation and the conditions for the functioning of clusters in these countries have their own specific features. A study of Russian clusters allows us to compare their results with similar data for other countries, which indicate the presence of a positive effect for enterprises from working in a cluster, although not in all cases. The paper examines the effect of operating as part of a cluster for industrial enterprises in Russia. The main method of study is regression analysis of the production function with the binary variable ‘Cluster’. The targets of the study are industrial enterprises in 15 clusters in Russia that receive support from government programs. The reference group included businesses that are similar to those in the study group in terms of specialization and number of employees and are located in Russian regions with no clusters. Enterprises for the control group were selected according to the similarity of the type of economic activity and the size of the enterprise. In total, data were collected on the results of 368 enterprises, for the period from 2006 to 2015. Data was used as panel data.Financial and economic indicators for industrial enterprises were retrieved from the Ruslana database. Therefore, the results enable us to conclude, that in Russia in considered industrial sectors, in general, businesses, located in clusters, are more efficient, than ones outside clusters, but the degree of such efficiency is not high. These results do not completely correlate with foreign ones, where the researcher usually notes more pronounced effects