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Размерные признаки в уголовном законе
The article discusses the calculating losses’ elements in the criminal code, their development and significance today. These elements are widespread practice in defining economic crimes. There are some general problems with defining their substance and methodic of their calculation. Basically, they use as a tool for creating aggravating circumstances with regard to economic crimes, so they are designed as a workable mechanism of inflicting the punishment. However, the empirical data shows that there are either disbalance in penalization (that is number of convicted for crime with aggravating element of such type is more than number of convicted for a “simple” crime) or disbalance in application of punishment. Using as an example a fraud in especially gross size, it may be shown that there is not any clear impact of size of stolen property on applied punishment. The historical research shows that in Empire’s era calculating losses’ elements were not widespread in the criminal code. In Soviet time, such elements were used more and more. Up to the late 1980s, some of such elements were approximately defined in case law; however, the most part of these elements were not clearly defined either in case law or in scholar publications. To improve the effectiveness of calculating losses’ elements, the author proposes some steps de lege ferenda. The main step would be calculating losses with regard to economic status of the victim that is using diminishing of company’s actives in percentage as a threshold. The second step would be limiting use of calculating losses’ elements in criminal legislation.