Today Premier Dmitry Medvedev holds a session of the presidium of the Presidential Council for Modernization of the Economy and Innovative Development of Russia. Establishing and functioning of the Agency for Technological Development and promotion of innovations in the spheres of oil refining, security, waste recycling, information technologies and agriculture will be discussed. Apparently, such measures should contribute to overcoming the crisis in the Russian economy. However, experts are sure that the economic crisis is systemic in the country.
“We have created a completely speculative model of our economy. There are speculations in the monetary market; there are speculations in the development of the budget,” the first deputy chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Economic Policy, Sergei Kalashnikov, says.
To illustrate his conclusion, he gives an example of the situation with adoption of the principle of the budget program building two years ago: “There are no programs, despite the fact that a program budget has been introduced for the second year. They rewrote the budget expenditures supposedly for programs, and budget financing on cost estimates continues. The program assumes a final result, and our budget has no final result. So there are no programs.”
Kalashnikov says that the speculative economy pervades all areas of industrial production, the monetary market, and the creation of all sorts of mega-powerful economic projects, which we have developed over the past 10 years. “All of this does not allow us to actually purposefully move somewhere. Everyone understands that it is necessary to modernize the economy. But we have authority which can modernize the economy. The government is basically unable to reform itself. It lives according to short-term important, required objectives, but they just do not see beyond 2018. And in order to reform the economy, to modernize it, you need to think in decades. So we do not have the authority to modernize the economy. That is why there is no modernization.”
The senator is sure that if Russia is not competitive on the world market, it will be “trampled on”. “How can we be competitive? The idea of catching up with someone has been proclaimed repeatedly – Portugal, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, we have to catch up with someone.”
Explaining the ineffectiveness of such an approach, Kalashnikov recalls the famous story of Achilles and the tortoise, when Achilles will never catch up the tortoise if it is in front of him from the very beginning. “We will never catch up if we try to catch up,” the senator is sure.
He asks what projects would allow Russia to pass its rivals: “What are the possibilities? Are we using these possibilities, including the innovative potential, the intellectual potential? No. The first thing to do is to come to a consensus on the economic model that will exist in the Russian Federation, and the second is just to create an appropriate mechanism for this model.”
