Russian Federation
The main economic challenge facing Russia is the achievement of longterm, sustainable growth at rates high enough to bring about relatively rapid convergence between Russian living standards and those of more developed western economies. Establishing conditions for sustained growth is therefore the central concern of the present survey. This focus necessitates paying particular attention to Russia’s economic structure. Russia’s economy is highly dependent on the export of a limited range of natural resources, chiefly hydrocarbons and metals, and it shares many of the characteristics of other “less-diversified economies”. Resource dependence confronts Russian policy-makers with a particular set of macroeconomic challenges, including vulnerability to external shocks, “Dutch disease” and the various institutional pathologies which are often associated with ...
Social and emotional skills are individual abilities, attributes and characteristics that are important for academic success, employability, active citizenship and well-being. They encompass behavioural dispositions, internal states, approaches to tasks, and management and control of behaviour and feelings. Beliefs about the self and the world that characterise an individual’s relationships to others are also components of social and emotional skills. The OECD Survey on Social and Emotional Skills (SSES) focuses on 17 social and emotional skills ranging from curiosity and creativity through to emotional control.
Strong economic growth until 2008 led to a reduction in official absolute poverty rates since the beginning of the new millennium. The financial crisis has interrupted the downward trend but it has not led to a poverty rebound. However, large income inequalities remain in the Russian Federation. Poverty risks are highest among children. The social support system in the Russian Federation is not geared towards the working-age population who, if not physically or mentally impaired, are widely held to be undeserving of social support. In addition, the redistributive power of the social protection system is limited. Social benefits are badly targeted and social security contributions are paid on income up to about 1.5 times average earnings in 2010.
Since the beginning of the transition process, Russia has progressively built modern fiscal institutions and fundamentally reformed its tax system and fiscal framework. Moreover, fiscal outcomes improved markedly in the past dozen years, reflecting rising oil prices, strong output growth and a commitment to restrain spending of windfall gains, supported by an institutional mechanism to manage resource wealth. The government paid off most of its debt and accumulated assets in two oil funds, which financed the large fiscal stimulus during the global crisis. However, fiscal policy has not sufficiently insulated the economy from oil price fluctuations. The surge in expenditure during the boom preceding the crisis, coupled with the fiscal stimulus during the crisis, left Russia with a large non-oil deficit, making it vulnerable to a sharp fall in oil prices. Moreover, the large non-oil deficit implies suboptimal saving from oil revenues and puts upward pressure on the real exchange rate, hindering diversification of the economy. There is therefore a need for mediumterm consolidation, even though the budget will record a small surplus this year, with only moderate deficits foreseen over the next three years. To reduce the procyclical bias of fiscal policy that is re-emerging in the current high-oil-price environment, and to assist in the consolidation of the budget position, the non-oil deficit target in the Budget Code that was suspended during the crisis should be restored and complemented with binding ceilings on the annual growth in expenditures. Long-term fiscal pressures arising from demographic trends should be addressed in the first instance by equalising the pensionable ages for men and women and gradually raising the pensionable age in line with gains in longevity.
This chapter presents recommendations on improving the overall management of natural resources in the Baikal Natural Area (BNA), including through: streamlining the policy goal-setting system; improving the information base for WRM s; creation of a system of compulsory information disclosure concerning environmental performance indicators; and streamlining the system of monitoring of the status of the BNA’s ecosystem.
This chapter examines the legal framework for SME and entrepreneurship policy in the Russian Federation, the distribution of responsibilities across federal government for different aspects of SME and entrepreneurship policy, and the extent of policy leadership and co-ordination. It also assesses the major strategic directions in SME and entrepreneurship programme support that the federal government has chosen to pursue and the distribution of federal SME programme spending across different activities. Recommendations include developing an integrated master plan for SME and entrepreneurship promotion and shifting the weight of programme expenditures away from general SME investment and start-up subsidies towards more targeted subsidies aimed at innovation and exporting and more business development services such as company diagnostics and consultancy.
The Russian Federation enjoyed a decade of strong growth between the 1998 financial crisis and the intensification of the global economic crisis in September 2008, but has since been gripped by a severe recession. The main near-term challenge for policy-makers is to manage the consequences of the economic downturn and limit its severity and duration. Looking beyond the crisis, the overarching challenge is to put in place a sounder growth model, one driven by innovation, investment, and the accumulation of human capital. This will ultimately require reforms in many areas, but this chapter focuses on a limited number of key challenges: 1) further strengthening the macroeconomic policy framework; 2) improving the functioning of the financial system; and 3) raising the levels of competition throughout the economy via streamlined state involvement and lower barriers to entry.
In virtually all of the relatively successful transition economies, new small private businesses have served as a primary engine of growth, absorbing resources from the state and former state sectors and exhibiting notable dynamism in the context of fierce competition and hard budget constraints.54 Some studies suggest that the creation of dynamic new and usually small firms out of the "ruins" of old enterprises has been the most vital part of the overall restructuring process and productivity growth.55 A thriving small business sector also reduces the social costs of transition by absorbing released workers from downsizing in large restructuring firms.
In the wake of the technological revolution that began in the last decades of the 20th century, labour-market demand for information-processing and other high-level cognitive and interpersonal skills have been growing substantially. Based on the results from the 33 countries and regions that participated in the 1st and 2nd round of the Survey of Adult Skills in 2011-12 and in 2014-15, this report describes adults’ proficiency in three information-processing skills, and examines how proficiency is related to labour-market and social outcomes. It also places special emphasis on the results from the 3rd and final round of the first cycle of PIAAC in 2017-18, which included 6 countries (Ecuador, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Peru and the United States). The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), was designed to provide insights into the availability of some of these key skills in society and how they are used at work and at home. The first survey of its kind, it directly measures proficiency in three information-processing skills: literacy, numeracy and problem-solving in technology-rich environments.