In 2024, the government will have to audit national projects
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On the eve of 2024, when the system of national projects will be revised and extended, the “Bulletin of the Institute of Economics” of the Russian Academy of Sciences published an article about the preservation in strategic planning of problems that were discussed when drawing up a unified plan for achieving national goals by the current government. These are demands for achieving formal figures instead of strategic goals and partial contradictions of initiatives within the system of national projects, for which it was already criticized by the Accounts Chamber in 2019–2021. New inconsistencies have also emerged – primarily, plans to accelerate growth in most industries in the context of the Bank of Russia’s inevitable strict monetary policy. Both economic uncertainty and objective contradictions between what is desirable and what is possible in the course of adapting the economy to the “new normal” can prevent these problems from being taken into account when revising national projects.
In 2024, the White House will have to conduct an audit of the national projects on which economic planning in the Russian Federation is based, and decide which of them will be extended and which will be curtailed. As financial support for this work, as First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov told Kommersant at the end of 2023, the authorities are preparing to rebalance the tax system. In this situation, the article by leading researcher at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergei Bratchenko, published in the December issue of Vestnik and dedicated to systemic problems of strategic planning in the Russian Federation, is of particular interest – it follows from it that the previous inconsistency of a number of sectoral goals of national projects, sometimes contradicting each other ( such as the growth of agricultural exports and the fight against poverty), a number of problems were added caused by the adaptation of the Russian economy to new conditions after the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine and subsequent macroeconomic instability.
For the first time, we recall, interest in the issue of internal conflicts of national projects arose in 2019–2020, which accounted for the majority of published works on the topic – which was caused by the claims of the Accounts Chamber (then under the leadership of Alexei Kudrin) to the role of a “strategic auditor” of the system (see. “Kommersant” dated January 15, 2020). Then it turned out that the departments’ plans did not take into account a quarter of the indicators of national projects and half of the goals of state programs (see “Kommersant” dated February 6, 2020), and Mikhail Mishustin instructed the White House to correct the situation by interconnecting projects (see “Kommersant” dated February 11, 2020 of the year). This resulted in the approval by government decree No. 2765-r of October 1, 2021 of the “Unified Plan for Achieving National Goals,” consolidating government efforts and private and budgetary funds to implement 46 state programs, 14 national and 75 federal projects, 42 strategic initiatives, etc.
However, as follows from the work of Sergei Bratchenko, even in its current configuration, the system of national projects retains several types of internal conflicts – for example, within the framework of one project there are discrepancies between operational (usually numerical) and strategic (at the level of ideas) goals; in the totality of public administration projects, the author identifies duplicating and similar initiatives with an excessive number (thousands) of intermediate indicators that transform sectoral departments from executors of state policy into monitoring structures; the single plan records “gaps” between federal and regional plans. In an even broader framework, the author documents the discrepancy between plans to accelerate growth in most industries and the strict monetary policy of the Bank of Russia, which acts as a limiter to this growth. The White House, however, recognizes the importance of the stabilizing function of the Central Bank in the economy, counting on “targeted” adjustment of state support for priority projects within the framework of the existing structure – which guarantees the Russian Federation an interesting budget cycle this year and competition between projects for access to it. “Kommersant” will monitor developments.
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