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program, the Ministry of Industry and Trade "synchronized" the timing of its implementation with the national export development project, and in fact, simply shifted the deadlines to 2024.
A new government document updating the import substitution targets has not been presented since the start of the war in Ukraine.
What has been achieved?
There is no single approved effective metric for assessing import substitution in the Russian economy. But such an assessment is made from time to time at the Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting (CMASF), founded in 2000 by economist Andrei Belousov, who has been First Deputy Prime Minister since 2018. The center calculates the indicator for each industry through the ratio of imports and gross value added at current prices. This approach allows us to derive an indicator that can reflect import substitution and does not depend on the dynamics of the ruble exchange rate and the purchasing power of Russians, Vladimir Salnikov, head of the real sector of the CMASF, explained to The Bell.
The last time CMASF published a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness of import substitution by the fifth anniversary of the declaration of this policy was in 2019. In terms of import substitution, there has been practically no progress in recent years, Salnikov concluded then in his final report: one can speak with confidence about import substitution only in the context of the manufacturing industry (but not the economy as a whole) and only for a short period of 2014–2015. As evidence, he cited a graph from which it followed that from 2015 to 2019, the ratio of imports and value added remained practically unchanged:
Experts from the Gaidar Institute came to the same conclusions independently and with the help of a completely different methodology. From 2014 to 2018, they regularly surveyed industrial executives about import performance. From mid-2015 to the end of 2018, the share of enterprises planning or actually implementing import substitution fell threefold, to 10% of those surveyed. “The scale of import substitution was small, and over time they began to fade,” concluded Sergei Tsukhlo, head of the Gaidar Institute’s market survey laboratory, at the end of 2019. In 2019, monitoring was terminated "in connection with obtaining a clear picture and getting rid of illusions."
The opinion of Salnikov from CMASF on the success of import substitution over the past two years has not changed. “To a large extent, the success of import substitution in terms of increasing the share of competitive domestic production in the industry was in the agro-industry, which enjoyed state support, and in the chemical industry, where business managed in many respects on its own. The state played a decisive role in import substitution of the defence industry and related industries,” Salnikov told The Bell.
15 RUSSIA Country Report October 2020 www.intellinews.com