Vol 29, No 4 (2018)

The main directions of the impact of defense expenditures on the economy have been analyzed. It has been stated that there are no clear criteria for attributing defense spending to unproductive budget expenditures. Defense expenditures have been assessed for reasonableness and sufficiency. Alternatives of the spending budget funds have been considered. Assessments of the level of Russian defense expenditures necessary for national security in the next 10 years have been given.

The rationale behind the key tasks in the development of Russia’s fuel and energy complex, agroindustrial complex, defense industry, and machinery industry and construction complexes has been presented using the apparatus of Kondratiev’s long cycles, i.e., upward and downward waves in the production and export of oil, grain, arms, cars, etc. as well as in the supply of new housing. The trends have been analyzed using Rosstat data for a 100-year period. The analysis has shown how the past rates of development and proportions affect the present and future growth of Russia’s economy. Some of the main tasks have been formulated for the future development of Russia’s economy until 2030. The processes of import substitution and the replacement of oil exports with grain, arms, and cars have been discussed. The issue of the social and economic significance of solving the housing problem in Russia has been raised.

The current state and possibilities of ensuring Russia’s food security in the dairy market have been analyzed. The development limitations of the resource base of dairy farming and the domestic demand for dairy products have been described.

The article has presented the results of research conducted to evaluate the influence of investment and innovation factors on the development of machinery in the regions of the Russian Federation. The research uses unique methods of assessing the innovative component of investment activity and the effectiveness of innovations. They have been used to perform quantitative evaluations of investment effectiveness and innovation activities in regions with the developed machinery industry, as well as the evaluation of the influence of innovation and investment factors on production indicators and foreign economic activity in these regions. The obtained results have shown that the innovative and investment activities in the majority of regions have a significant impact on the competitiveness of the output in machinery industry and potential of the regional exports. The regional machinery production behavior has been forecasted based on this.

The article has addressed the problem of the deindustrialization of the economy as a result of an increase in cost of manufacturing products due to a decrease in the industrial proportion between the prices of products of extractive and processing industries. The restoration of the industrial proportion has determined opportunities to increase production for five groups of products in the machinery industry, reindustrialization, and economic growth.

The article has examined the mechanisms that have determined the processes of the automobilization of the population in the past and describes their possible transformation under the influence of technological, sociocultural, and institutional changes that are already occurring and expected in the future.

This paper has presented methodology for assessing the economic need for personnel with higher scientific qualifications and the mechanisms for regulating the process of its reproduction. Approaches to forecasting the dynamics of personnel of higher scientific qualifications that take into account the provision of additional annual need for Candidates and Doctors of Sciences in scientific, educational, and knowledge-intensive sectors of the economy, as well as the experience of countries with effective market economies, have been considered. Based on the developed methodology, quantitative indicators of the annual additional need for Candidates and Doctors of Sciences for different sectors of the economy have been calculated.

This article has presented a short-term macroeconomic indicator, the index of monetary efficiency, which is an aggregate of two subindices, i.e., monetary stability and monetary freedom. An econometric model has been constructed, in which the GDP depends on the index of monetary efficiency with a lag of 8 months, which allows for the proactive prediction of economic growth. All analytical tools have been evaluated based on the statistical data of the Bank of Russia with a monthly breakdown.

A quantitative model of Russia’s information and communication technologies (ICT) ecosystem has been proposed that describes the main relationships between its participants, as well as the impact of environmental factors on the functioning of the ICT ecosystem. Based on the model, we have assessed the long-term (until 2030) potential for the development of Russia’s ICT sector in the case of the state’s active and stimulating strategy and the formation of an advanced system of institutions. We have also evaluated the contribution of the ICT sector to the macroeconomic dynamics while implementing the target scenario.

Based on the comparison of Canada and Russia from the point of view of resource-geographical similarity, the differences in the structure of the economies and foreign trade of the two countries have been shown. One of the most important reasons for the unsatisfactory structure of the Russian economy and its technological backwardness is the country’s natural rent, which is spent not on innovative development in the economy, but on the implementation of insufficiently economically motivated geopolitical projects.

This paper has presented an approach to measuring the trade integration in the Eurasian Economic Union based on the decomposition of foreign trade turnover and the allocation of nonfuel trade in the tradebalance analysis, as well as the importance of trading partners and economic dependence in integration associations. The advantages of the parameter of foreign trade nonfuel quota that characterize the interrelation of the objectives of liberalization of the economy in the model of regional integration of the Eurasian Economic Union have been substantiated.