Assessment of the Contribution of Scientific and Technological Progress to the Real GDP of Russia

The paper discusses the assessment of the contribution of scientific and technological progress to the real gross domestic product (GDP) of Russia. The instrument of this assessment is the production function of the national economy. The paper presents two variants of the production function of the Russian economy, which have successfully passed all the diagnostic procedures adopted in econometrics. In the first variant, the index of scientific and technological progress (STP) is included in the set of explanatory factors such as the level of fixed capital, the amount of live labor, the price of oil, the indicator of Russia's default, the Global Financial Crisis and sanctions of Western countries. In the second variant of the production function, there is no NTP index. The scheme of construction of the production function consists of two stages. At the first stage of the scheme, statistical models of the production function are evaluated with mandatory testing of the hypothesis of the cointegration of non-stationary time series of logarithms of Russia's GDP levels, fixed capital and living labor levels and oil price levels. At the second stage of the scheme, the stability of estimates of the production function calculated from different training samples was investigated, and the accuracy of ex-post forecasting was estimated. At the second stage of the production function construction scheme, the model with the NTP index showed higher accuracy of post-factum forecasting. This circumstance, combined with the result of testing the statistical hypothesis about the presence of scientific and technological progress in the Russian economy, made it possible to assess its contribution to real GDP: other things being equal, scientific and technological progress increases the annual real GDP of Russia by about 0,6%.