Book chapter
Выступления и комментарии к докладу Р.М.Энтова
Two problems associated with the adequacy of traditional methods for describing the national economy as an object of study are considered. The first of them is due to the fact that technological progress leads to a decrease in the degree of representativeness of traditional macroeconomic indicators, i.e. to reduce the degree of representativeness of generally accepted methods of describing the economy. The second problem is related to the erosion of the borders of the national economy in connection with the processes of globalization, which leads to the fact that the national economy is gradually losing its representativeness as an object of study.
The global economy passes the COVID-19 related crises. For various projections, the output fall in Russia in 2020 will vary from 2 to 8 percent. So, in comparison with the crises of 1998 and 2008, the current shock can be more severe. In the upcoming years the Russian economy will pass the recovery stage, approaching the new balanced growth path. What proximate sources would push this growth?
With the neoclassical industry growth accounting and the Russia KLEMS dataset the present report aims to shed light on this, considering the growth patterns and sources of growth after the crises of 1998 and 2008. The report unveils the most important sources of the after-2008 stagnation in Russia, which are the decreasing efficiency of the extended oil and gas sector and the suspension of technology convergence. Since the recovery in Russia will be, most probably, caused by the increasing demand on energy and raw materials, driven by the recovery of global markets, policy implications for Russia should include efforts to improve efficiency in such export-oriented sectors, as oil and gas, and efforts, which aim to boost technology convergence such as backing export-oriented firms, which have been integrated to global value chains.
Problems of the Russian economy are under consideration.
The article describes the main features and parameters of the shadow economy, with a bird eye over Russian economy as an example. The description of the technological coefficient in the framework of V.K. Dmitrieff - W. Leontieff is given. Specific (originated from Political Economy) point of view as to relation of commodities - as (still) one of the key elements of an economic system - is formulated and established. .
In this chapter, we consider the process of technological progress presenting one of the options for measuring its speed throughout the entire historical process. We find that the general dynamics of accelerating technological growth over the past 40 thousand years can be described with amazing accuracy (R2 = 0.99) using the following simplest hyperbolic equation: yt = C/t0 − t, where yt is the technological growth rate measured as a number of technological phase transitions per unit of time. Although since 40,000 BP the speed of technological progress tended to generally increase, however, according to the theory of production principles on which we rely, the acceleration of technological progress had noticeable fluctuations. These fluctuations can be explained by the fact that technological development proceeded within the framework of super-long cycles. We show that, within these cycles, the phases of accumulation of basic breakthrough innovations are replaced by phases of rapid growth of improvements in basic innovations and their wide distribution. These fluctuations between cycle phases affect the pattern of acceleration of technological progress. Currently, there are a number of calculations of the point of singularity of the Big History and global evolution, which generally localize the singularity around the first half of the twenty-first century. The point of singularity in our calculations, if we rely only on historical time points, falls on 2018, that is, in principle, it fully fits the results of other studies. There is a fairly reasonable idea of slowing down a number of important social processes (such as demographic development, urbanization), including the speed of technological progress. Indeed, there are already some grounds for talking about signs of a slowdown in progress from the 1960 to 1970s. However, according to the theory of production principles, as already mentioned, there are strong fluctuations in the acceleration of technological progress. We assume that at the moment technological progress is in the fourth—the scientific and cybernetic—production principle. According to this theory, we expect a powerful acceleration of technological progress in the area between the 2030s and the 2070s. In this case, if we take into account the expected time points, the point of singularity, according to our calculations, is estimated to be around 2106. That is, with this method of calculation, we should first expect a new way of acceleration of technological progress, and then, its slowdown in the region of the end of the twenty-first century—the beginning of the 22nd. We also identify the social mechanism for such acceleration and deceleration: in the coming decades, the process of global ageing can cause technological acceleration first and change its direction, and then closer to the end of the present and the beginning of the next century, on the contrary, elderly society can be a brake on scientific-technological progress.