Russia at the Crossroads: Two Roads to Global Economic Competitiveness

Relying on a wide range of foreign sources, the author presents the concept of "high" and "low" roads to national economic competitiveness and argues that, over the past fifteen years, the Russian economy has been gradually slipping down toward the "low road" and "immiserising economic growth". Russia is in urgent need of a visionary national strategy of integration into global market economy that would take into account the world-wide dominance of post-industrial "knowledge economy". Current government economic policy should focus on creating enabling conditions for Russian companies to learn to compete with the leading trans-national corporations on their own terms, i.e. mostly by enhancing their products’ and services’ innovativeness and attractiveness for the most demanding global consumers rather than by minimizing costs and prices.