Problems of regional economic policy and the development of a complex of measures for regional federal support are currently acquiring ever-greater significance among the tasks relating to the state regulation of socioeconomic development. This is because of two basic reasons. First, the extremely complex process of formation of new federal relations has shown that the preservation and the strengthening of Russia as a unitary federal state are inseparably connected with overcoming negative tendencies in regional development that arose in the pre-reform period, with the all-around use of regional factors to attain common strategic goals in the nation's socioeconomic development. Second, the principal socioeconomic problems that are due to the economic crisis and the radical reform of the economic system (unemployment, a sharp decline in the living standard of significant masses of the population, income differentiation, the formation of new social groups, the deterioration of the ecological situation, and a number of others) are fraught with potentially explosive situations that are manifested specifically in regions and that consequently should be resolved at that level first.
