Assessment of orientation degree of the Far East regions on international markets

The regions of the Russia Far East are located in a contact zone of the largest continent and the largest ocean near China, Japan and the Republic of Korea having their considerable economic potentials. Remoteness of geographical position of the Pacific regions from the Russian central part defined specifics of their development at the end of the 20th century. Hence, disintegration of the USSR, political and economic crisis in the 1990s, destruction of economic relations resulted in a certain "isolation" of the Far East from other Russian regions, whereas the territorial neighborhood with the countries of the Asian-Pacific regions created favorable preconditions for the development of international cooperation. As a result of such changes, the scales of foreign economic relations began to develop rapidly. The purpose of this work is the assessment of economic orientation of the Far Eastern regions to the foreign markets. We accepted export and import volumes as key indicators. Taking into account these indicators, we calculated export, import and foreign trade quota and the index of economy orientation to foreign markets. All calculations cover the period from 2000 to 2010. On the basis of obtained results we identified three groups of the Far Eastern regions by the degree of economic orientation to the foreign markets. It goes without saying that the open economy is a positive phenomenon. Such economy favors the shifts in political and social spheres, expands possibilities of a consumer choice of population and, thus, it promotes an increase in the standard of living. But, without having analyzed the export and import structures, one cannot make any definitive conclusions. So, if we analyze the export structure of the Far Eastern regions, we shall see that natural resources dominate in it. Dominance of raw materials in the export structure testifies to the low technical and industrial level of the regional economy. One can also make a similar conclusion on the basis of the analysis of import structure in which cars, equipment and vehicles are the most imported types of production. The Far East economy remains oriented to the foreign markets, as a whole. At present the region cannot provide itself independently with agricultural production and consumer goods. At the same time it remains a source of natural resources for the adjacent Asian countries. It is more difficult to provide and keep sustainable development for the Far Eastern regions with a low economic potential and weak foreign orientation. At the same time the regions with a very high level of orientation have an excessive dependence on a foreign market that results in considerable risks in extreme situations. Hence, in our opinion, under these conditions the variant with moderate foreign orientation of the regions, which at the moment is noted in two subjects of the Far East, i.e., in Khabarovsky Krai and in the Republic of Sakha, is the most optimal one.

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