They won’t catch up, so at least they’ll get warm – Newspaper Kommersant No. 11 (7456) dated 01/23/2023

State-owned companies are less efficient than private ones, and the reduction in subsidies does not save them resources and does not push them to increase productivity, notes a work published in the fall of 2022, but actively discussed in recent days, by researchers from the Bank of Russia and the Higher School of Economics. At the same time, the state of the competitive environment in the market affects the efficiency of private and state-owned companies to a greater extent: a high level of competition can narrow the gap in their productivity. The results of the study are relevant in the context of expanding state subsidies for the sake of restructuring the economy of the Russian Federation and the withdrawal of the financial bloc of the government from supporting competition for the sake of stability: against this background, the pro-competitive approaches of the FAS both to government orders and to the development of exchange trading look more effective against this background and are close to the position of the Bank of Russia itself.

Researchers from the Bank of Russia and the Higher School of Economics Evgenia Bessonova and Ksenia Gonchar studied the impact of the level of competition in the market and subsidies for state-owned enterprises on their efficiency by analyzing data from the Ruslana database from Bureau van Dijk for 2008-2015 (more than 270 thousand companies in all industries , except for the agro-industrial complex, finance and a number of public services). The relevance of the study is dictated by the high level of state participation in the Russian economy: according to Rosstat, in 2016, there were 311 thousand state organizations, including state institutions, with more than 18 million employees, and the state’s share in GDP in the same year was 46% (state-owned enterprises – 70% of output ).

The results of the study confirmed the relationship between the type of ownership, the level of technical efficiency (TE, the ability of companies to operate at the production possibilities frontier) and the growth of total factor productivity (TFF): private companies show higher TE for all years of observation in all sectors studied (TFG growth differs by sectors). Labor productivity per employee in terms of revenue and value added in state-owned companies is 75% lower than in private ones. The authors also state serious problems in the production system and technical inefficiency of most companies, while the largest gap in the efficiency of the public sector and private business is typical for the hotel business (10.3 p.p.), processing and transport (9.5 p.p. each). ), the smallest – for mining and trade.

The authors’ hypothesis that tighter budget constraints reduce the efficiency losses of enterprises has not been confirmed: the tightening of the budget policy does not lead to an increase in the productivity of state-owned enterprises – on the contrary, subsidies smooth out the difference in the efficiency of private and state-owned companies (which removes the risk for them of reducing state injections under economically justified regulation ). The level of competition turned out to be a more significant factor: although SOEs remain less efficient when it grows (except in markets with extremely high levels of concentration), the need to compete for the market with private business helps to narrow this gap. “Regulation aimed at increasing competition is always a desirable complement to privatization, since it improves the efficiency of both types of ownership,” the authors state.

The conclusions of the authors are interesting from the point of view of the forks of state policy – the sanctions that force the economic bloc to budget injections into the restructuring of the economy to a self-sufficient model, pushed the support of competition into the background. Thus, the government has already scaled up the practice of non-competitive purchases from a single supplier, and the practice of direct price regulation has become more frequent. The FAS, which is responsible for pro-competitive policy, has been forced to support it almost alone in the last year – in the service, in particular, they warned the government against extending the practice of a single supplier due to the limitation of the state order market. The Ministry of Finance acted as an opponent in this matter, the department is concentrating on the technical function of the state order – the ability to quickly and transparently conduct purchases – although the role of state orders in shaping the demand for goods and business services is growing (see Kommersant dated September 23, 2022). The FAS also advocates the idea of ​​expanding parallel imports (including with the aim of increasing the level of competition in the market and the efficiency of enterprises) and the development of exchange trading in goods in the Russian Federation and the creation of a transparent pricing system in the domestic market (see Kommersant of December 28 and January 11) .

However, although in recent years the FAS has quite noticeably lost the opportunity to cooperate with the financial bloc of the government, the position of the department has naturally moved closer to the position of the Bank of Russia: the Central Bank not only analyzes the impact of competition on the productivity of the Russian economy, but also coincides with the FAS in their views on stock exchanges as a tool ensuring this competition (see Kommersant dated August 10, 2022).

Diana Galieva, Oleg Sapozhkov