Budgetary Problems of a Large City: the Case of Novosibirsk

Abstract

The paper considers the key factors and conditions which define concentration of the population and economic activity observed in major cities and agglomerations of the Russian Federation, and it shows that the Russian budgetary regulatory environment and policy play an important role in the advancing development of large cities along with well-known factors such as market volumes, a higher quality of labor, scale effects, higher innovative activity due to competition, and etc. To analyze the expenses of the RF budget system made in a city, the authors carried out a case study for a city budget of Novosibirsk and it shows that the expenses of the city budget make no greater than 1/3 of total expenses of the Rf budgetary system made in the city. The analysis of the Novosibirsk budget allows revealing key tendencies in dynamics of the budgetary indicators. The paper analyzes the structure of the city budget to show whether the city budget is well provided with its own revenues and how it depends on the transfers from the regional budget. The authors also consider the possibilities of how to use the budgetary resources to find major directions of expenditures made in territories of the city.