Determinants Of The Instability Of The Russian Economic Growth

Abstract

Based on a detailed comparative analysis of the concepts of "economic growth" and "economic development", the article provides arguments in favor of the thesis that from the post-default period to the present day, the Russian economy demonstrates not only steadily fading average annual GDP expansion rates, but also the so-called "impoverishing growth", "growth without development". The leading characteristic of the low-quality growth is recognized as the long-term evolution of the domestic economy in the vein of the historically futile natural resource export model, which, through the mechanisms of the "Dutch disease" and regular fluctuations in global energy prices, moves in an excessively cyclical form, inevitably making the socio-economic development of the country unstable. Significant determinants of its unstable growth, carefully concealed by the methods of misleading macroeconomic statistics presented in the article, are also uncovered being the dominance of extensive factors over the intensive ones associated with increasing macroeconomic efficiency and achieving accumulation rates close to the optimum values, the socially conflicting nature of GDP growth, accompanied by the excessive income inequality, both in terms of income and property, even in the relatively favorable conditions compared to global practice, and the resource-intensive and wasteful nature of the dynamics of the national economy.