By Vestnik Kavkaza
The beginning of 2013 was marked by a significant slowdown in the Russian economy. Russian experts give forecasts of the Russian economic development.
“In recent month significant slowdown took place in the economic growth. At the moment the problem is that economic activeness should be recovered,” Viktor Ivanter, the head of the Institute of Economic Forecasting of RAS, says. “What is being discussed? The first version is that we should develop slowly, but effectively. Effectively means innovatively, and there are no innovations without investments; but investments won’t flow into standstill economy, market economy is demanded. So, this version is rather naïve.
Should the economic growth be maximal or minimal? There is a problem of a minimal pace of an economic growth. To maintain the level, a zero economic growth is not enough, due to the fact that we have financial debts – we don’t spend sufficient investments in our infrastructure – industrial and social.”
“We should look at a potential of the economic growth from the point of view of demand and producing capacities of the economy,” Alexander Shirov, deputy director of the Institute of Economic Forecasting, Russian Academy of Sciences, thinks. “It is always said that producing capacities are overloaded, while the volume of involved capacities is too high and cannot grow further. We don’t think so. In recent years launching new capacities in metallurgy, automobile industry, transport machinery, chemical industry, construction materials producing industry was much higher than the growth of production. In reality the situation got better. Moreover, these capacities are modern and directed at internal demand. From this point of view, encouraging internal demand has obvious advantages and can contribute to the economic growth.
Moreover, enterprises improve effectiveness of using labour resources. There is no deficit of employees in producing industry today, including the segment which provides the internal demand. We don’t see any restrictions in production and demand, so the economic policy which encourages the economic growth can be effective in a short-term and a long-term perspective.”
Commenting prospects of development of the North Caucasus Federal District, Shirov told Vestnik Kavkaza: “There are regions with different levels of progress. There is a leader, Krasnodar Territory, which is developing quite rapidly. In addition, large investment projects related to the Olympics 2014 are being implemented there. In this sense, the main challenge of Krasnodar Territory is that after the project is finished and all the facilities are built, there might be a possible investment pause that will lead to the inhibition of economic growth, and that will be a problem. We have to think how, with the help of which investment projects. we will be able to maintain these high economic dynamics. As for the North Caucasus Federal District, certainly, it is one of the regions that are economically lagging behind. In this regard, the main problem of the North Caucasus Federal District is certainly investments. That is, unfortunately, until now businesses have not been willing to invest in the development of the North Caucasus region with its various factors of political and economic character. Basically, the task is to ensure that with the help of the redistribution of investment flows the region starts to have an outstripping economic growth rate. A similar problem exists, for example, in the Far Eastern Federal District. But the Far Eastern Federal District is also facing the problem of maintaining the population. In the North Caucasus Federal District this problem does not exist. In fact, the main advantage of this region is that there is a sufficient population there and it is a resource to be used. Talking about the development of this region until 2030, we believe that there are prerequisites for this development to be higher than the development of Russian economy. In this case, we will have to be able to achieve a gradual reduction of differences between the indicators of the level of life of the population, of the income in Russia on average and in the North Caucasian Federal District. The program for the development of the North Caucasus region, which was adopted last year, will partly contribute to it.”
