Forget and start over? How we implemented the Strategy 2020

Igor Ognev, publicist

According to the Strategy, which had been developed for two whole years, and absolute poverty had to disappear just before our eyes - 6-7% per year. In fact, it swelled by over 12%.

Real disposable income (what remains after mandatory payments) was ordered to increase by 64–72%. However, compared with 2012, they fell by 2020, according to academician Aganbegyan, by 7%.

Budget spending on key areas: medicine and education - in our social sphere - as before the amendments was spelled out in the Constitution - the state planned to raise to 11-11.7% of GDP. Now the industry for two is satisfied with 6.6%.

Finally, in order to reach social peaks, the strategy laid down that real, that is, excluding inflation, GDP will grow by 3.5–4% per year, investment in fixed assets by 6.1%, and industrial production by almost 4%.

According to Rosstat, GDP seemed to have grown by 0.7-1%, but this miserable increase was knocked out by inflation. Independent analysts' estimates show that the economy has stagnated, never recovering from an 8% dip in 2008-2009. Again, according to Rosstat, over the years the economy has still grown by 4%, but experts are talking about a recession. For example, according to the calculations of Grigory Khanin, a professor at the RANEPA, the GDP has not yet reached the 1991 level. Khanin claims that labor productivity also hangs out there.

Why is there such a huge gap? Mainly, says Professor Khanin, due to different assessment methods the state and dynamics of fixed assets. Rosstat RF, by the way, like the Goskomstat of the USSR, consider the index at residual value and share of wear. But at the same time they underestimate depreciation deductions, thereby exaggerating the amount of profit, and thus cutting back on future investments in compensation of material and moral depreciation of equipment. Downplays Rosstat and employment dynamics, not including immigrants. In fact, the number of employees was declining, not compensated by the state of fixed assets. Hence the drop in productivity. Khanin and his colleagues have been fixing the bias in the assessment of fixed assets for almost half a century! Selyunin and Khanin wrote about this in their sensational article "The Crafty Digit" published by Novy Mir. But both before and now statisticians fool both the authorities and the population with "successes" in the economy. But the standard of living of Russians for some reason is rolling under the bench...

What did the experts hope for, laying in the strategy, albeit not too ambitious, but still optimistic indicators? After all, the best minds were attracted to work. The team consisting of twenty-one groups was headed by the head of the HSE Yaroslav Kuzminov and RANEPA Vladimir Mau. Among the authors of individual chapters were well-known authorities in the country. But this is only the direction of the directions, and the total number of people who piled over two years over the text of more than a thousand pages totaled several hundred class specialists. They seriously believed that the country would finally get off the notorious needle of raw materials and start restructuring the economy, relying on high technologies.

Hopes were naive. A strange reform of the Academy of Sciences broke out, which the former head of the Ministry of Education and Science ranked as one of the branches of the economy. As a result, as INTERFAX reported on April 16. RU, President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Sergeev, "due to the loss of control over the network of academic institutions due to the resonant reform of 2013, the Academy cannot directly engage in scientific research and fight against coronavirus infection."

The vertical of power was also generously making its contribution, launching a conveyor belt for stamping instructions, laws and all sorts of acts. Last week, ex-prime minister and deputy head of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev admitted that the “regulatory guillotine,” under which the authorities are canceling regulations and GOSTs, including Soviet ones, should help to “break out of the pit of technological backwardness”. State regulation “always lags behind progress” and “very often slows down this progress”, Medvedev said during an online meeting with Skolkovo startup leaders.

In addition to regulatory "logs", wonderful compatriots insert wheels into the wheels. According to the HSE poll, one in five considers technical progress harmful to society and the economy, and a quarter, according to VTsIOM, as if the Sun revolves around the Earth! Moreover, the share of supporters of technical progress until 2011 was double that. According to this indicator, Russia is in the penultimate place among more than 30 countries! If we call a spade a spade, then such a state of the population is close to marasmus. Why? Because, judging by the study of the Boston Consulting Group, there is no noticeable demand for knowledge, since the conditions for the realization of talents and abilities have not been created. If a doctor in Russia gets more than a driver by 20%, then in Germany - by 174%, and in the USA - by 261%. In the global ranking of human capital competitiveness, Russia is only 107th out of 118.

What is most interesting is that the government does not plan to significantly increase funding for science in the next 5 years, although it is not clear who calls for a technological breakthrough. By 2024. expenses for these purposes will grow in our country by only 0.1% of GDP - up to 1.2% of GDP. This is 3-4 times less than in South Korea, Sweden, and Taiwan... Looking at the bounties of the state, business saves on R&D: the share of large companies in the leading countries is 70%, and in Russia it is from 33% at the beginning of 2000s cringed up to 28%.

In an interview with TASS in March, Putin said that "We wanted to get away [from oil dependence] and are gradually leaving ... the share of non-oil and gas revenues is growing ... But it takes time, you can't do it with one click of your fingers." Alas, according to independent experts, the share of production, one way or another connected with hydrocarbons, still feeds two-thirds of GDP. Last year, of the 419 billion dollars of Russia's export revenues, 60% was provided by three goods: crude oil (121.4 billion dollars), petroleum products (66.9 billion dollars) and natural gas (19 billion dollars). Half of these revenues came from Europe, where the share of Russian oil in consumption reaches 30%, and gas - 40%. The ambitious plans to get off the oil needle, including the May decrees on the creation of 25 million high-tech jobs by 2018, remained on paper. The share of the manufacturing sector in GDP - factories and plants not related to the hydrocarbon pipe - even according to Rosstat dropped from 17.17% to 14.3% in 16 years.

The Russian economy is “fierce”, ironically notes Yakov Mirkin, the head of the department of capital markets Y.M. Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences. For 146 million people a year, the country produces 744 baby carriages, one skirt for 26 women, one pair of socks per person, one electric kettle for more than 500 families, and $ 3-4 per capita computing equipment.

Maybe not only fingers had to be snapped all these years?

If before that there was a certain balance in power between technocrats from the highest federal bureaucracy and security forces, then in 2012 the security forces came to the fore, and since then the fate of innovations is largely in their hands. When incomes of the population collapsed by 22% during the pandemic, who gets the wage increase? That's right, the security forces, as the president announced last week. Now you can not hide who exactly the head of state is leaning on: the people have already voted for zeroing. However, unlike the technocrats, the power clan did not, and will not have, a positive vision of the future.

The authors of "Strategy 2020" honestly wrote that Russia has a problem with the quality of state institutions, that in terms of a business-friendly business environment, we are not much different from the poorest countries. But the measures that could correct this situation did not arouse interest among officials. The idea of increasing the responsibility of officials for the actions from which business suffers did not find support either.

Many economists who participated in the work on the strategy were not mistaken: economic growth is impossible without political competition, corruption is eating away at the country. People simply have no incentive to invent and do new things if a profitable business is sooner or later privatized by security officials or competitors who are patronized by the authorities. That no judgment, pinned down by a stern boot, will help them. However, Kuzminov and Mau did not have a "mandate" for political reforms.

And now the authorities are shyly silent about the fact that the entire program for protecting direct foreign investments has failed. Since 2011. time, they practically reset due to foreign policy. The attractiveness of Russia for immigration has not grown, and it has not been possible to reduce employment in the public sector. And instead of integrating university science into global science, we now have restrictions on the same siloviki on the contact of scientists and university teachers with foreigners. Power has not become more open - the mechanisms of participation of various interest groups in decision-making are formal.

So today you can predict what side life will turn to the Russians in the coming years.