Rating as a universal tool

Regional authorities gradually drift from the sphere of policy into the sphere of management

The rating was originally created exclusively as the handbook for the direct investor. Then it was gradually expanded as a universal tool of estimating performance results and forecasts of various aspects of the regional development. For example, once we quite successfully used it for predicting the political future of the regional leaders.

By the way, the rating forecast value has not run low until now - re-nomination first of all touched the chiefs of the regions with a stable improvement of their rating positions (the contrary is also true, in more detail refer to “The Expert”, № 44, 2005).

However the regional leaders' vector of responsibility and reporting was nevertheless changed by the government reform. They gradually move from the sphere of policy into the sphere of management, speaking plainly, they become managers in the first place.

It requires another approach to the system and tools of estimating the activity of regional administrative “teams”. The federal authorities' hard work at this problem led to several evaluation approaches (“Kozak's criteria”, the list of the Ministry of regional development of the Russian Federation, etc.), each of which is based on the complex system of parameters, part of which is unfortunately absent in today's statistical reporting. Some foreign countries use a basically different approach - the authority current activity is estimated mainly by sociological inquiries of the population and business representatives, the results of which are published in the press.

Considering a new tendency, we introduced a new component into the integrated investment risk – a management risk. Thus an emphasis was made on the assessment of the results of the regional authority activity in social, financial (budgeting), special purpose, economic spheres in view of the dynamics of the region development. For example, one of the universal parameters prevailing in the world practice - the infant mortality level (table 6) was chosen for estimating the performed social functions of the regional management system. The comparison base was adopted to be not the Russian average parameter of the death rate (11.0 ppm), but an average index for the developed countries of the world according to “The Statistical year-book of the United Nations” (6.0 ppm). The comparison with the chosen normative standard showed, that only St.-Petersburg's infant mortality level more or less corresponded to the used ratio.