The Impact of Economic and Political Factors on Attracting Direct Investment in the Regions of Russia in the 2000s

The present paper analyzes the correlation of economic and political factors affecting the attraction of investments into economy of Russian regions. The author describes the features of the distribution of foreign direct investment in the Russian regions in the 2000s, various methods of measurement of investment attraction conditions and base theoretical approaches to explain the reasons for the investment growth. In the empirical part of the paper presents the possibility of statistical analysis in the study of problems of regional economic policy through the use of factor analysis, linear regression and structural equation modeling. The following results were obtained. There is the significant impact of two economic factors on the attraction of investments: agglomeration economy and the resources factor. The grade of democracy of regional institutions turned out to be insignificant factor. The author offered a hypothesis to explain the difference impact of economic and political factors in attracting investment, which may be used for the preparation of future research.