Tertiarization of the Economy in Russian Regions: Deindustrialization or Postindustrialization?

The accelerated development of the tertiary sphere has long been a refrain in the world scientific discourse. At the same time, tertiarization in Russia differs from the processes taking place in developed countries. An article based on EuroStat and World Bank data compared the structures of gross value added and employment in the tertiary sector in Russia and Europe. Rosstat data are applied to analyze the results of transformation of the tertiary sector of Russia in the post-Soviet period and Russian regions are typologized according to the structure of gross value added in the tertiary sector and employment dynamics. In addition, the impact of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 on the dynamics of the tertiary sector is considered based on quarterly tax receipt data from the Federal Tax Service. It was revealed that Russia’s declining lag in the 1990–2000s in the share of the tertiary sector in the economy stabilized. However, the country did not succeed in approaching the world leaders, due to a later entry into the tertiarization process, the weighted structure of the economy, the peculiarities of the settlement pattern, and the unstable dynamics of disposable income and inertia in the transformation of the way of life. The level of development of the tertiary sphere, which played an important role in overcoming the negative social consequences of the transition to a market economy, is highly differentiated among federal subjects. Quantitative and qualitative growth of the tertiary sphere is characteristic of no more than 15 of the most advanced regions. In most of the rest, it is more of an adaptative nature against the background of a recession in other sectors of the economy. The stability of the tertiary sector in a crisis period depends on the ratio of its more inertial nonmarket and vulnerable market subsectors. Both strong regions with moderate diversification of the tertiary sector and the weakest regions, where market sectors are represented mainly by retail trade, are in the zone of greatest risk.