The Accounts Chamber requires numbers – Newspaper Kommersant No. 193 (7394) dated 10/18/2022

The Accounts Chamber (AC) has published its comments on the draft budget for 2023-2025. The most serious questions from state auditors were caused by the macroeconomic assumptions underlying the forecast: it is not clear to them why oil should fall in price in this way, investments should grow, the global economy should shrink, recover from the collapse of Russian GDP and consumer demand should increase – especially against the background of the fact that, as stated in the joint venture, structural changes in the economy of the Russian Federation in the coming years, judging by the draft budget, will not change its structure in any way.

Conclusion The Accounts Chamber on the draft budget is one of the formal stages of its adoption. JV auditors do not have the authority to give negative or positive feedback, and this makes them more free in their wording. Meanwhile, the comments of the team of Alexei Kudrin on the current draft look the most serious in recent years (even taking into account the de facto extreme circumstances of budgeting – we recall that it was developed before the decision on partial mobilization, which significantly affects the macroeconomic situation).

At the same time, there are at least slightly more “accounting” claims in comparison with previous years: the most important remarks concern the macro-construction underlying the budget.

Apparently the most meaningful question of the joint venture to budget forecasts (scenario conditions and forecast of the Ministry of Economy, the forecast of the Central Bank in the “Main Directions of the Single Monetary Policy”) is a simple but important observation: they all suggest that structural changes in demand for 2023–2025 “are not accompanied by significant changes in the composition of production components”. In other words, the JV states that, according to the assumptions of the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Finance (and, to a lesser extent, the Central Bank), structural shifts in the Russian economy are not expected at all, despite the fact that, in essence, the main budget task for the coming years is to support adaptation (that is, adjustment) of the economy to greatly changed conditions of foreign trade. In principle, the only answer to this question would be a statement by the Ministry of Economy that they see it as their task to maintain, in spite of everything, the structure of the economy unchanged. However, it would be very difficult for Maxim Reshetnikov’s department to motivate such goal-setting, despite the fact that it is intuitively understandable and has some relation to reality.

The second most important substantive issue of the Joint Venture to the government is about investments. “The text of the forecast does not provide a rationale for what factors will stimulate the expansion of investment activity,” the conclusion says. The joint venture does not actively attack the construction in which investment growth is achieved by replacing declining private investments in 2023–2025 with state investment. However, the auditors’ calculations, according to which the share of expenditures of the consolidated budget over the next three years will not grow, but decrease relative to GDP, this logic, in theory, is called into question.

Finally, the third question is a formal reproach to the government for vague formulations about a discount on energy exports in 2023–2025. (The Central Bank expects the discount to be stable, the Ministry of Economics to shrink) is indirectly related to the question of how the parameters of the new “budget rules” were determined in general, limiting oil and gas revenues that can be credited to budget revenues to the amount of 8 trillion rubles. per year (plus target inflation). Against this background, the issues of the joint venture with regard to forecast inflation, the incomes of different groups of the population, consumer demand, and the parameters of world and Russian GDP are secondary. In fact, the JV confirmed that the budget for 2023-2025, with its notional spending at the level of 1-1.5% of GDP per year, a flexible and large government reserve fund, other uncertainties, and the ability of the White House to rule it on the fly, almost everything itself in itself some convention in the spirit of the times.

Dmitry Butrin