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economic policy from time to time and sounded mainly in the context of agriculture. Vladimir Putin rarely mentioned import substitution. For 10 years from 2004 to 2014, this word itself appears on the Kremlin website only 35 times, and in none of the speeches is it the main topic.
Putin himself in these years spoke more than once about import substitution with skepticism. “We often say that one of the tasks of industrial modernization is import substitution. But, I think, the criterion should not be import substitution, otherwise we will rely on our own strength in the spirit of the Juche ideas, but still the production of high-tech competitive products, ”Putin said, for example, at a meeting of the State Council on industrial development in 2007 .
Everything changed in 2014-2015, when Western sanctions were imposed on Russia after the annexation of Crimea. In April 2014, the government for the first time included import substitution in the state program "Industrial Development". In May, this task appeared in the first list of Putin's economic instructions to the government after Crimea. At the end of May, speaking at the St. Petersburg forum, Putin called import substitution one of the eight main tasks in the development of the economy, which will allow "returning our own market to national producers."
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev created a special commission on import substitution (in the government of Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, it no longer met, the last meeting was held in December 2019). Medvedev announced the highest share of imports in strategic areas of industry: 90% - in machine tool building, 80% - in civil aircraft building, 70% - in heavy engineering, 60% - in oil and gas equipment, 50% - in power equipment, 50-90% - in agricultural engineering.
By 2015, the government has developed and approved more than 20 import substitution programs. By 2020–2021, they intended to sharply reduce the share of imports in engineering, machine tool building, light industry, the pharmaceutical industry and other industries. Within the framework of the programs, the state assumed obligations to support Russian manufacturers through subsidies, grants, investment contracts, co-financing of research and preferences in public procurement. During 2015-2020, the government allocated almost 3 trillion rubles for import substitution in industry.
But there was no summing up of the results of the import substitution program. On December 10, 2019, Dmitry Medvedev, who was living his last months as prime minister, reported that Russian production was growing most successfully in the food and processing industries, “not bad” (growth from 10 to 30%) increased the volume of domestic products in engineering, radio-electronic industry, forestry industries in the chemical industry. And already on December 19, instead of summing up the preliminary results of the
14 RUSSIA Country Report October 2020 www.intellinews.com