Agriculture and industry in Russia: Are there any indications of an entrepreneurial ecosystem?

Abstract

. Ecosystems that allow obtaining synergistic effects from agreed actions of their participants recently have become the most attractive market patterns for the study. The paper tests the hypothesis about the presence of the ecosystem relationships between the agriculture and industry sectors in Russia. The methodological basis of the paper comprises the theories of ecosystems, entrepreneurship, complexity, and regional economics with respect to entrepreneurial ecosystems. The researchers apply economic-statis-tical and regression analysis to investigate crop growing and related industries of agricultural mechanical engineering and fertilizer production in the Russian Federation. The research data come from the performance of enterprises of these industries in 1990–2019. The central idea of the study lies in the assumption that to promote national economic development it is necessary to integrate the aforementioned industries in an ecosystem having single technological and digital standards. The findings of the empirical part demonstrate a weak correlation between the growth of indicators in crop growing and mechanical engineering, and simultaneously, a stable correlation between indicators of crop growing and chemicals industries. The constructed linear regression models evidence that in Russia the entrepreneurial ecosystem that integrates the agrarian sector with the related industries is at its early stages. The fundamental problem of organising such an entrepreneurial ecosystem is a systemic dependence of the Russian agricultural industries on institutional factors, primarily, on the government subsidies, and lack of the corresponding project solutions. The authors argue that the organisation of the entrepreneurial ecosystem bringing together agriculture and industry will foster another high-tech sector in the Russian economy.