Environmental investment is a powerful "support" for the progressive and sustainable growth of the post-pandemic economy of Russia

Abstract

The objective need for environmental investment to overcome the reproduction of anti-sustainable environmental trends in the modern Russian economy and its post-pandemic recovery is substantiated. Environmental investments that meet the criteria of the global ESG agenda are positioned as responsible in their essence and transformative in their functional role. Original scientific judgments are presented on the impact of such investments on the dynamics and intensity of "green" innovations (new technologies, production processes, supply chains capable of solving issues of waste processing and industrial reproduction of raw materials from waste resources, as well as the use of alternative energy sources, etc.), which are able to generate long-term and sustainable growth of aggregate factor productivity (TFP) and ensure the radical transformations of the economic system associated with the formation of a "green" circular economy. Regressive models (growth curves) have been constructed for the current domestic economy, taking into account the volume of environmental investment, confirming the hypothesis of the "weakness" of this process in the Russian Federation, including due to the lack of significant changes in the state environmental policy. The minimum necessary economic tools of the state policy in the field of stimulating environmental investment in Russia have been formed in order to post-pandemic recovery of its economy and ensure long-term sustainable growth of TFP. The conducted research makes a certain contribution to the development of the theory of endogenous economic growth by taking into account the impact of environmental investment, which is initially focused on the effective use of natural capital, on the maximum involvement of waste resources in economic turnover, the replacement of traditional production technologies with environmentally friendly or low-carbon, the improvement of ecosystems, the production potential of the economy, the quality of the environment and social changes.