Structural change in Russia: how gas burns productivity
19 November 2012 5:00 pm CET
Ilya Voskoboynikov, University of Groningen
Venue
wiiw, Rahlgasse 3, 1060 Vienna, lecture hall (entrance from the ground floor)
Description
Outstanding performance of the Russian economy in the last decade is widely explained by extra revenue from export of oil and gas. At the same time numerous studies of supply-side sources of Russian economic growth point out multifactor productivity as the key factor. The objective of the research presented at the seminar is to resolve this debate with a newly developed detailed dataset. This dataset consists of industrial time series of output, labor and capital, and covers 34 industries for the period 1995-2009. It provides an opportunity to represent aggregate growth rates as a sum of contributions of labor, capital and multifactor productivity in industries (industrial growth accounting). The research results suggest that the two most important drivers of economic growth in Russia are capital in Oil and Gas and Low Skill-Intensive Services as well as multifactor productivity in High Skill-Intensive Services. Results also show that expansion of the low productivity Oil and Gas sector slows down aggregate multifactor productivity growth.