Application of the Asian Type of Performance-Based Pay for Regional Civil Servants in Russia

Russia’s regions have been required to operate under heightened external and internal constraints, including intensified sanctions pressure and persistent interregional disparities in socio-economic development. Under these conditions, strengthening the performance incentives of regional executive authorities becomes a practical governance task. This article develops an approach to performance-linked remuneration for regional civil servants and tests it on the case of the Republic of Bashkortostan.

Methodologically, the study proceeds in three steps. First, it constructs an integrated index of regional socio-economic development with an environmental component, based on official statistical data and a system of six sub-indices aligned with major ministerial responsibility areas. Second, it uses Kohonen self-organising maps to cluster Russian regions, enabling benchmarking within more homogeneous groups and identifying Bashkortostan’s position in the cluster structure for 2015 and 2020–2022. Third, it links collective and individual bonus payments to measured outcomes through a game-theoretic mechanism based on a modified optimal-contract framework that accounts for the institutional specifics of public administration and incorporates budget balance as a constraint on incentive design.

The empirical results (i) map the centre–periphery pattern of regional performance, (ii) locate Bashkortostan within the national cluster configuration, and (iii) compute the size of performance-based bonus payments for the region’s executive authorities for 2022 under the proposed rules. The article’s contribution lies in adapting optimal-contract logic to the meso-level of public administration and in combining index-based performance measurement, cluster benchmarking, and incentive design in a single applied framework. The proposed approach can be implemented as a modular algorithm for calculating performance-linked bonuses, subject to data availability and further calibration to regional institutional arrangements.

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