Monotown

A monotown (a calque from Russian , monogorod; gorod="town") is a city/town whose economy is dominated by a single industry or company. This means that most employments (except for service to residents like schools and shops) are by the main company. The term is especially often used in Russia, where the Soviet planned economy created hundreds of monotowns in supposedly rational locations, often in geographically inhospitable areas. The situation in many of Russia's monotowns is highly problematic: they are entirely dependent on the competitiveness of a single company or factory, very unflexible and based on Soviet-era economics and technologies.

The Soviet planned economy aimed to establish industrial facilities in rational locations, based on military, political, bureaucratic and economic criteria. The goal was to maximise regional specialisation. The dominant enterprise was responsible not only for production, but for providing social services to the population, such as housing, child care, etc.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, most of the monotowns' dominant enterprises were privatised, and consequently many of them had gone bankrupt by the end of the 1990s, either deliberately (usually it was more profitable to sell the property of an enterprise than to keep it functioning) or due to uncompetitiveness, caused by the shrinkage of the home market outside the consumer goods sector, unrestricted import of low-cost industrial wares from China, Turkey or other countries and the lack of long-term investments by the private owners, who were for the most part interested in quick money rather than development or modernization. Private owners also mostly refused to provide social services to the populations of monotowns, referring to such practice as being "economically inefficient" - however, the government's attempt to delegate the responsibility of providing social services from the companies to the newly created local municipalities was mostly a failure, as they lacked resources to complete the transformation. That led to a radical decrease in quality of life in monotowns, which enjoyed higher-than-average wealth for the most part of the Soviet period.

According to a Russian government study conducted in 1999—2000, there were 467 cities and 332 smaller towns in Russia which could be classified as monotowns. The combined population of these towns was 25 million, or a sixth of the country's total population. The 900 monotown enterprises—most of them involved in heavy industries such as manufacturing, fuels, timber, pulp and metallurgy—accounted for more than 30% of industrial production.

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