Economist Maslennikov believes that we should not return to the old structures
The new, as you know, is the well-forgotten old. That's the flower of our economy, industry representatives are asking the government to return the State Planning Commission. And with it — five-year state planning. They probably missed the flashy slogans like “Five-year plan in three years!” or «Let's hand over the object by the Great October!»
278 managers of large and medium-sized industrial enterprises took part in the survey conducted by the State University of Management. 37% of them believe that it is necessary to return state planning to all spheres of the modern economy. Another 41.5% say that it is better to do this only in a few industries. Well, only 13.3% are sure that it is inappropriate to do this.
The return to economic roots is understandable. The business will get loans, for example, it will be engaged in electronics, in which we have a big backlog. And we just need to «catch up and overtake.» But in a year it will turn out that we have established good-neighbourly relations with the former unfriendly country, and all sorts of imported microchips and gadgets for Russia will be several times cheaper than raising production from scratch by trial and error.
Judging by the results of a survey of industrialists, they need firm confidence not just in the future, but for the whole five-year period ahead. No matter what they say, in the era of developed socialism, Soviet people and plant directors had such confidence.
Although it can be assumed that most modern managers are people of a fairly young age. And it is unlikely that they caught the time when, according to the predestination of the party, the rivers turned back or successfully competed with the Americans in space exploration. Of course, there were advantages to long-term planning.
But there were moments (and quite a few) when the building trust could get a brick machine to complete the construction of a residential building only in the next five-year plan, and this is in two years. Because the three cubic meters of excess bricks for the current five-year plan are not planned, they are not filled in the State Planning Commission. Partly because of the bureaucratic rigmarole, the Soviet Union collapsed.
So, back to the USSR today?! After 30 years of some kind of market economy.
“Not everything is so straightforward,” Nikita Maslennikov, an economist and leading expert at the Center for Political Technologies, comments on this survey. — The participants showed a more flexible position, therefore, the mention of the State Planning Commission and the five-year plans is rather a metaphor. Yes, domestic business today is in a state of serious uncertainty. To make a decision on development, he needs a guaranteed demand for products, at least from the state. We need a long-term perspective to optimize production, employment, and investment activity.
The expert believes that the request is not for the State Planning Commission, as such, but for the strategic vision of the state — what it needs and how it is going to support the manufacturer. In a word, no one is going to evict the State Duma from the building that historically belonged to the Soviet State Planning Committee.
— They are weakly linked to the development of production, the modernization of the economy. These projects exist on their own, and they need to be translated into the system. We need market mechanisms. If we have stable taxes and insurance premiums, there will be a completely different attitude towards investments. We need market mechanisms and competition. First of all, this environment is necessary for the state so that it can choose products according to quality.
— Really, and this is already being done in some industries. The state tells industrialists what it needs in the area of critical imports. Companies receive preferential loans and invest their own investments. And they give an economic effect. All this works in a market economy and without any State Planning Commission. We should not rush from one extreme to another.