The Interrelation between Digital and Tax Components of Sustainable Regional Development

Abstract

The paper explores the relationship between digital characteristics and tax potential of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation as factors of sustainable development ofterritories and economic growth. The purpose of the study involves development and testing of amethodology for assessing the level of digitalization in Russian regions and its relationship withtheir tax potential, which has not been sufficiently developed in the available scientific research byRussian and foreign authors. For this purpose, cluster and factor analysis were applied with the useof Rstudio, the IBM SPSS statistics package, and the Anaconda Navigator graphical interface. Thefollowing data were studied: the number of active subscribers of fixed and mobile access,subscribers of fixed and mobile broadband access as well as mobile communication devices for allconstituent entities of the Russian Federation. The authors identified the worst and best regions interms of mobile and fixed communications. It was concluded that the regions’ readiness for digitaltransformation is determined by the general level of their economies. Significantly larger taxrevenues per capita are generated in regions with a highly developed IT component, which is thebasis for solving the problems of sustainable development of such territories. The economicsituation in a region, its gross regional product, and its tax potential create the basis fordigitalization of each constituent entity of the Russian Federation. Significant tax revenues percapita are the key to the success of the territories in the IT sector. Promising areas for furtherresearch are: (1) expansion of the indicators used and time horizons; (2) extrapolation of the resultsto other countries and groups of countries; (3) use of the methods and models that have proventhemselves when working with short series, e.g., autoregressive integrated moving average models