The Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on the Socio-Economic Development of Monotowns in Russia

Abstract

As of today, there are 321 monotowns in the Russian Federation, where a total of 12.7 million people or 8.7% of the entire population of Russia live. Monotowns are territories characterized by high dependency of socio-economic stability on a single city-forming enterprise or industry, which makes them prone to crises even without external shocks.

This study is dedicated to examining the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis in the monotowns of the Russian Federation. The work explores how the pandemic has affected the existing problems caused by the single-industry specialization, focusing on economic and demographic indicators. The basis of the study is open data from official statistics. A unified database of statistical indicators for all single-industry municipalities from 2015 to 2020 was compiled to aggregate and analyze this data. Subsequently, by modeling with the method of exponential smoothing and utilizing the historical data series for the 5 years preceding the crisis, forecast estimates of the indicators for 2020 were obtained, as if the crisis had not occurred, and the territories continued the development trend set in previous years. In this article the author tried to search for and analyze deviations between the actual values of the indicators and their forecast estimates obtained during modeling. The author identified negative deviations in the development dynamics of most monotowns, but didn’t found a uniform response of the indicators of all territories to the crisis conditions. However, the additional standardization of the indicators allowed for the differentiation of these territories and revealed a number of patterns depending on the scale, industry specialization, and spatial position of the monotowns.