What stops to get off oil
The institutional weakness of the Russian economy and politics appeared before us without embellishmentK. V. RodionovWhen the crisis began, many politicians and experts spoke about the need to diversify the Russian economy. The vast majority of members of the establishment, including the President, call for ending commodity dependency of Russia, in which the welfare of the country depends on how traders with wall street will react to the latest data on stocks of oil and oil products in the USA.The question for Russia is not new. In the Soviet era was known for the slogan "oil pipe": in 1970-1980th years the massive inflow of petrodollars has given citizens a minimum level of consumption, but also compensated for the lack of competitiveness of products of machine-building industries. The first years of market reforms were a clear illustration of the last point: after the removal of trade barriers the shelves of local stores quickly filled with imported goods, and the Russian motorists have started to change to let used, but still foreign. In a period of dynamic economic growth 1999-2008, the situation essentially has not changed: in the past 10 years, Russian exports 80% consisted of raw materials - oil, gas and metals, and in the structure of imports was dominated by machinery and equipment.Surely Russia has a "resource curse"? In my opinion, the solution to the problem of modernization of the Russian economy rests on the problem of the quality of economic and political institutions. And with this in recent years, business in Russia is irrelevant. In the ratings of international agencies involved in the assessment of the state of civil society and the political system, Russia every year it gets lower. We can not all be attributed to the factor "initial bias" and politicization of international ratings: it is hard to imagine that organizations that analyze the state of civil liberties and freedoms of the press (Freedom House), the level of global competitiveness (World Economic Forum), the rights of shareholders and creditors (Oxford Analytica), which measures the index of economic freedom (The Heritage Foundation and Dow Jones & Company, Inc.) and the level of corruption (Transparency International), all together weave an anti-Russian conspiracy.".