A Meeting with the Authors of Strategy 2020

On 6 April 2012, Sergey Drobyshevsky, Director of the Center for Macroeconomics and Finance of the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy, took part in the meeting of the students and faculty of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration with the authors of the renewed program Strategy 2020.
The discussions at the meeting addressed the issues of the world economy and Russia's macroeconomic policy. In his opening speech, Vladimir Mau, the Academy's Rector, stressed that Strategy 2020 was not to be confused with the program that the RF Government would have to elaborate on their own at a later stage. ‘At the same time, some of Strategy's chapters are already being discussed with the President and the Chairman of the Government on a weekly basis', he added.

 

Sergey Drobyshevsky spoke of the medium-term challenges that the Russian Federation's macroeconomic policy is currently faced with. In his opinion, these are the inadequate business climate, decline of the able-bodied population, ‘development' gaps that the expert defined as ‘the impossibility to make simple decisions concerning industrialization from a zero base, as it is being done in some other countries that are lagging behind Russia in terms of their economic development. 


And finally, Sergey Drobyshevsky believes that one of the main challenges is the high degree of dependence of Russia's economy on the fluctuations in the world economy. ‘We possess such abundant natural resources that raw materials will remain an essential component of our economy under any scenario', he noted.

 

According to Sergey Drobyshevsky, the Government must, in order to achieve macroeconomic growth, set the following priorities for its activity: to lower the risks for doing business, improve the business climate, create incentives for saving, to increase expenditures on human capital, and reorient the economy to external demand.

Summing up his presentation, Sergey Drobyshevsky specified three goals for Russia's macroeconomic policy. ‘The priorities are to stabilize budget expenditure, achieve stability of the tax system, and encourage the development of banks and other financial institutions', he said.

 

Alexey Moiseev, Head of the Macroeconomic Analysis Department of VTB Capital, delivered a report on the new architecture of the world economy.

When speaking of the macroeconomic problems faced by developed countries, Moiseev described as ‘immoral' the money emission policy that many of them resorted to in the crisis situation, and predicted that the super-cycle in high oil prices would soon be over. ‘The plans put forth in Strategy 2020 will have to be implemented before that, otherwise they won't be effective' he said. The expert believes that the economic problems being experienced by the West can be solved by increasing labor productivity through a technological breakthrough or by cutting down expenditures. ‘As for the present situation, the shift of mass productiotechnologies to countries like China has effectively deprived the Western powers of their competitive advantages' - such was his pessimistic conclusion in regard of the West.

 

Alexey Moiseev also renounced the thesis that developed countries could ‘pull the world out of recession'. ‘The aggregate GDP of all these countries is less than the annual debt volume of the ten top world economies. The current US budget deficit is comparable with the Russian economy's per annum volume', - he noted.