Is it time to be nervous – Newspaper Kommersant No. 31 (7476) of 02/20/2023

Last week, the State Duma Committee on Economic Policy published its amendments to the government bill on the specifics of statistical accounting in the annexed territories. Its essence is simple: it was proposed to allow the delivery of data until 2026 even in electronic form, as required by the Russian law on statistical accounting, even on paper. Amendments by a group of deputies led by the chairman of the State Duma Committee on Economic Policy Maxim Topilin change the meaning of the document, supplementing it with a new article allowing the White House to widely refuse to publish official statistics.

The idea looks strange: if the government needed such a right, what prevented it from being included in the draft right away? Moreover, the absence of amendments did not prevent the FCS data on foreign trade from being closed. However, this closure did not have much success either – every deal has two sides, and if the Russian refuses to give details, then there is still a foreign one, whose amendments are not a decree, not that jurisdiction. Anyone who wants to know how many machine tools the Russian industry imported from Germany or China will find out from the reports of the German or Chinese statistical bureau, and the FCS only lost the opportunity to clarify these data on their part.

The government’s proposed expansion of the ability to edit the federal plan of statistical work and close more and more new data may aggravate the situation. The fact is that in order to make decisions, business needs as much information as possible about what is happening in the sphere of its interests. Of course, a business would like to have data on all the transactions of all competitors, but this would stimulate it to hide its own. And statistical data is a compromise amount of knowledge that companies share with the authorities and which the state “returns” to business in the depersonalized form of statistical reports. In the context of sanctions, internal restrictions, logistical problems and supply-demand gaps, the reduction in data about what is happening affects the quality of decisions in the same way that fog on the road affects speed and safety.

Throughout the year, we have been writing that the main problem of the state is the unwillingness of business to invest, because state reserves, with all their abundance, will not be enough to rebuild the economy, and the main problem of private investors has become the uncertainty of the economic situation. The recommendation to close your eyes so as not to be scared is good only when it’s really scary and nothing can be done, and here the question arises: did the relevant committee of the State Duma learn something about the Russian economy that the government doesn’t know, or only assume that may find out soon?