Ge eo oJ Jo ou ur rn na al l o of f TTo ou ur ri is sm m a an nd d G Ge eo os si it te es s Year X

An intensive movement of people, which is typical in areas with strong tourism industry, is perceived to provide numerous positive externalities with regards to the diversity of cultures, ideas, and knowledge. Border regions act as natural contact zones experiencing the influx of tourists across borders. The borderland is expected to benefit from their geolocation and intensive cross-border cooperation, acting as testing grounds for external innovations. The article iS designed to test the interdependence between the tourism industry and innovation activity in the borderland. The study focuses on the western border regions of Russia, which is a highly divergent area in terms of socio-economic development and experiences challenging times in the context of geo-economic turbulence after 2014. By using the statistical research method, the study develops on evaluating the dynamics of indicators for tourism industry development and innovation activity. The eight-year period of 2012-2019 is applied for taking into account the lag in innovation performance resulting from the positive externalities of tourism. Results show that the growth in tourism industry and innovation activity of found in regions with intensive public expenditure on large-scale infrastructural projects.

Throughout the history of humankind, people have settled along seashores. The gradual accumulation of population and industrial activity in coastal areas has created preconditions for coastalisation — the movement of people and socio-economic activity to marine coasts. To date, coastal areas have a higher rate of economic development, fostering migration and an influx of capital across the globe. Scholars and policymakers voice concerns about the asymmetry of regional development and the increasing anthropogenic impact on the coastal ecosystem. It reinforces the importance of coastal zone management. In this study, we use an example of the Baltic region to identify the coastalisation patterns in the Baltic region and answer the question, whether there can be a single definition of the coastal zone of the Baltic region. According to a broad definition, the Baltic macro-region is nearly all coastal and, consequently, all settlements are influenced by the coastalisation effect. We have studied the urban population dynamics in 128 cities of 45 coastal regions through the lens of various characteristics of a coastal city — the distance from the sea (10, 50, 100, and 150 km), location in a coastal region (NUTS 2), availability of a port and its primary maritime activity (tankers, cargo, fishing, passenger, recreational vessels and others). The research results suggest that despite the strong coherence of the Baltic region countries, there should not be a single delimitation approach to defining the coastal zone. Overall, the most active marine economic processes occur in the zone up to 10 km from the seacoast and 30 km from ports and port infrastructure. However, in the case of Sweden, Poland, and Latvia, the coastal zone can be extended to 50 km, and in Germany — up to 150 km inland.

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The coastal regions are increasingly in the focus of contemporary academic research as economically favorable territories with high innovative potential. The coastalization factor gets individual attention, the influence of which is registered in various countries of the world as a tendency of the population and economic activity to concentrate in the coastal zone. However, there is significant heterogeneity between the coastal areas, due to natural and climatic features and affecting their economic development. This paper focuses on assessing the differences in the readiness of the coastal regions of the European part of Russia to the innovation economy, taking into account their geographical location (northern, northwestern, southern). The study is conducted at the level of municipalities across 6 regions of Russia: Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, Leningrad, Kaliningrad, Rostov regions, and Krasnodar Krai. The research methodology included an assessment of 4 most important components of an innovative economy: human capital, business environment, knowledge production, and technological equipment. The results of the study showed a high degree of spatial divergence in terms of the level of readiness for the development of an innovative economy both between the regions of the sample and within them in the inter-municipal context. It is revealed that the concentration of innovative potential within the coastal region is largely the result of the cross-influence of the agglomeration and the coastalization factors. In the case of their complementary influence on coastal municipalities, the latter are characterized by a relatively higher level of readiness for the development of an innovative economy than inland ones. This is true for both the northern, northwestern, and southern coastal regions of the European part of Russia.

Digitalization has affected the economies and the everyday life of the population all around the globe. Industries are going digital with the Industry 4.0 mode changing the conventional practices of doing business. People spend a significant amount of time online shifting their daily routines to electronic format. The wide dissemination and adoption of ICTs place mutual expectations from the population to have competence in using modern digital technologies and from firms and public institutions to provide their services online. Not surprisingly there is a strong digital divide between territories in their digital capacity – the ability of a territory to generate digital content. This study is aimed at evaluating the digital capacity of cities and municipalities in Russia by measuring their digital footprint in the tourism industry. Tourism is found to be an information - intensive economy sector with a large volume of consumer-generated content making it ideal for measuring the digital capacity of territories. The research design is based on geotagged hashtags sourced from Instagram – one of the most popular social networks worldwide. The geographical scope of research covers 205 cities in 10 regions of Russia – Arkhangelsk region (14 municipalities), the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol (19 municipalities), Kaliningrad region (28 municipalities), Krasnodar region (26 municipalities), Leningrad region (69 municipalities), Murmansk region (16 municipalities), and Rostov region (23 municipalities). All of the regions are located in the European part of the country but differ in environmental, socio-economic, and geopolitical parameters. In order to focus on the tourism sector, the dataset on tourist accommodation establishments and bed places is collected in addition to population statistics. The analyzed data is mapped, and a series of figures present the re search findings. The research results suggest that consumer-generated content with place-related hashtags in Instagram is applicable for tracking the tourism sector development and the tourism-related digital capacity of a territory. However, a number of limitations are identified in using user-generated digital content in social media. This includes overrepresentation of large cities over smaller settlements despite not being the direct location of reference; ‘noisy data’ featuring additional meaningless information due to ambiguous hashtags; an increasing volume of commercial posts from bloggers, self-employed, and business.

Clustering of economic activity is an issue of particular interest for regional studies and economic geography, as well as an important practical task faced by Russian regions and related to the enhancement of competitive capacities. The aim of the study is to capture the current trends in the formation and development of clusters across the coastal regions of the European part of Russia, to determine the nature and degree of interdependence between the innovation, coastal, and agglomeration factors. The study is focused on the methodological aspects of studying the interrelation of the agglomeration space and the dynamics of cluster initiatives under the influence of coastalization. The study takes into account institutionalized clusters and de facto operating ones which have formed over the past two decades in the Rostov, Kaliningrad, Leningrad, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk regions, Krasnodar Krai, the Republics of Karelia and Crimea, Sevastopol and St. Petersburg. There have been identified the features (both advantages and problems) of the cluster development in coastal agglomerations, which are the foci of early clustering in the regions under consideration. In the context of increasing geo-economic instability, the factor of coastal location and external technological dependence initiated the innovation vector in shaping the cluster specialization, including in maritime sector, focused on import substitution.