Does state cluster policy really promote regional development? The case of Russia

From the moment of adopting in 2008 the Conception of long-term socio-economic development of the Russian Federation up to 2020, containing basic provisions about the necessity of creating a network of clusters as a condition for modernization of economy and realization of competitive potential, 10 years have passed. In this article estimation of influence of cluster policy in Russia on indicators of socio-economic development of territorial entities of the Russian Federation is given. On the basis of methods of analysis of panel data economic models have been prepared which allow estimating the effects of realizing cluster policy. Panel data is characterized by a large quantity of observations and that increases the number of degrees of freedom and decreases multicollinearity of factors by means of accounting individual differences. It helps to get more efficient estimates. The analysis of influence of cluster policy on socio-economic indicators of regional development has been carried out on the basis of using models with fixed and random effects. Calculations have been made in the Statistics package Stata 13. Results of the investigation have shown that economic growth of regions on the territory of which clusters have got financial budget support is largely due to their initially high level of development.