Adaptation without agitation – Newspaper Kommersant No. 50 (7495) dated 03/24/2023

The government this year will focus on measures to further adapt the economy to external shocks, which, as the authorities expect, should be completed in 2024. Among the stated priorities are building up social support for the population, developing infrastructure, ensuring technological and financial sovereignty, as well as strengthening ties with existing foreign trade partners and searching for new ones. These plans are a direct continuation of the work of the White House in 2022, which Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin reported to the State Duma on Thursday, March 23. De facto, the government intends to complete the systematic project of adaptation to the new conditions in which the Russian Federation found itself after the start of the military operation in Ukraine, without significant changes – its implementation in 2022 showed the effectiveness of the approaches laid down in it long before the moment when they had to be applied.

On Thursday, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin presented the State Duma with a report on the government’s activities in 2022 — the report, which took more than an hour and a half, covered the key anti-crisis measures of the White House last year and current state policy guidelines. The report was extremely detailed, the overview of the government’s activities looked exhaustive in the Prime Minister’s speech: almost all areas of the White House’s activities were mentioned, and there were practically no problematic ones among them. Probably, such a detailed, super-detailed report in the State Duma was largely needed to position the government in the system of authorities: an adequately functioning government, as a rule, is somewhat less noticeable, at least in the media, than any problematic power structure.

As the prime minister noted, 2022 has become a year of “a difficult adaptation period, a reassembly of economic ties” – as part of these processes, the government “systemically built its activities” based on 12 medium-term priorities.

Among them is ensuring macroeconomic stability, primarily through budgetary policy, in particular, increasing its flexibility both in terms of the “covid” experience and the planned reform of public spending management, as well as by injecting funds into anti-crisis programs. Budget policy also played a significant role in supporting the regions, which received 4 trillion rubles from the federal center, which is 10% more than a year earlier, and also issued budget loans to replace commercial loans by 720 billion rubles, which made it possible to save 65 billion rubles for debt service. In terms of spending on supporting the economy as a whole, according to Mikhail Mishustin, direct support from the budget and the National Wealth Fund alone amounted to 1.5 trillion rubles – in addition, almost 4 trillion rubles were issued. within the framework of various programs of concessional lending to companies, loans at floating rates and under the programs of the Central Bank were restructured for about 6 trillion rubles.

Adjacent to this work is the block to stimulate investment, including support for small and medium-sized businesses – as the prime minister noted, investment growth for the year is estimated at 5% – as well as measures to create Russia’s own industries, both purely sectoral and systemic, for example, due to the additional capitalization of the Industrial Development Fund by 120 billion rubles. Also, state policy was built around increasing social support, which the prime minister dwelled on in particular (in particular, it was about increasing the minimum wage, additional support for families with children), ensuring stability in the labor market and meeting domestic demand – both through parallel imports and a ban on re-export of equipment, components and medical products, due to which 1.7 thousand goods were “preserved” on the Russian market.

This year, the work of the government, as follows from the words of the prime minister, will be a continuation of the adaptation work of 2022, albeit in a less reactionary mode – the prime minister, although he made a reservation that “external pressure on Russia will not weaken,” nevertheless expects that in 2024 year, the adaptation period will already be over and the economy will move to “long-term progressive development”.

The priority areas announced for this year largely overlap with last year’s ones: for example, the trend towards further building up social support and measures to ensure the growth of real incomes of citizens, as well as the development of infrastructure, including transport corridors, which “should be built in accordance with the needs for export and import ”, including to strengthen trade and cooperation ties with the countries of the Eurasian Economic Union and China.

The “line” to ensure technological sovereignty will also continue: the government expects to achieve “stabilization of the industrial production index” and its growth by 2% in 2024 (according to the results of 2022, it decreased by 0.6%).

Among the measures already announced is the expansion of industrial mortgages through the inclusion in the program of projects for the construction and modernization of factory premises (see “Kommersant” dated February 21; in connection with this, it is planned to allocate an additional 1 billion rubles. for the implementation of the program). So far, according to Mikhail Mishustin, loans have been issued for the purchase of production facilities for a total of 2.5 billion rubles.

At the same time, the White House sees its task in “achieving financial sovereignty” – the development of the banking sector and its own stock market through the inflow of investments, which should be facilitated, for example, by the introduction of a single tax deduction for citizens who invest in various financial instruments of long-term savings. . However, the story about “financial sovereignty”, apparently, in fact, is even somewhat more than about “technological”: we recall that the change in the model of the financial market of the Russian Federation to a new one, which considers the main resource for the financial system not foreign investment, but domestic savings in the economy, has started essentially since 2015 after the transition to a floating exchange rate of the ruble and took place most actively in 2016–2019, after which it became the main factor in the stability of the Russian economy during the pandemic of 2020–2021 and after the imposition of sanctions in the spring and summer of 2022. At the same time, the idea of ​​“financial sovereignty” in itself does not imply isolation of the financial markets of the Russian Federation from the growing financial markets of Asia: the priorities in the development of cooperation with China and in the development of the North-South transport corridor are indicated in Mikhail Mishustin’s speech even earlier than the two “sovereignty” as the goals of the work White House for 2023.

Evgenia Kryuchkova, Dmitry Butrin