Tatiana Ivakhnenko took part in the International Conference on Econometrics and Business Analytics (iCEBA-2024)

. The conference brought together economists from different countries, including the UAE, Italy, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Kazakhstan and other. The participants discussed a wide range of topics, including theoretical econometrics, statistics, banking sector issues, corporate loaning, modeling of bankruptcies of enterprises and banks, regional development, as well as adjustment of inflation measurement and modeling environmental challenges in a growing economy.

Within the scope of the “Regional Economics” session, Tatiana Ivakhnenko presented findings of : “Analysis of the Factors of Economic Growth in Russia's Regions Based on the Latent Class Model”.

The first part of the report dealt with the literature review on the mechanisms of influence of the most significant factors on economic growth and elaborated on various channels of influence of digitalization and population aging on economic growth. In the second part of the report, two approaches were presented to empirically estimate the influence of factors on economic growth based on Russian regional data, namely, estimating a standard panel pool model on a full sample of regions and then using a latent class model (LCM) to identify clusters of regions where the base model was further estimated. As a result of applying these two approaches, it became feasible to identify a subsample of 21 regions for which the effect of digitalization was significant and positive, while for the full sample of regions this effect was either negative or insignificant. The influence of other factors, including population aging, for most models is consistent with the economic theory and results of previous studies.

During the discussion held following the report, insightful comments and suggestions were received, namely: the need to justify the choice of the number of classes when using LCM, as well as suggestion of possible explanations for the difference in the result for 21 regions from that for the full sample.

Presentation file attached.