Firm demography in Russian industry in the context of small business specifics: Is there a silver lining?

In this article, an empirical assessment of demographic changes in Russian manufacturing industries has been carried out for the first time. We mainly focus on the analysis of business death and the structural analysis of closed firms. The empirical basis for the study was provided by data from Rosstat and the Central Bank of Russia for 2005—2023, as well as a sample of 262,719 Russian manufacturing enterprises that were liquidated between 2016 and 2022. Methods of fundamental analysis, contextual, and structural approaches were used: the study was conducted at both the macro-level and the industry and individual enterprise levels, considering business birth and death rates, proportions of active and inactive firms, and the structure of closed companies by age, closure type, and degree of activity. The calculation of a modified death rate in industry has been carried out, taking into account the closure of only those enterprises whose death causes real damage to the economy. Its value turned out to be ten times lower than the traditional Rosstat coefficient. This proves that the well-established opinion about negative trends in business demography in Russia cannot be considered objective, as the death rate has been overestimated, and the trend towards its growth in most cases is due to the exclusion of economically inactive firms from USRLE (with zero balance sheets and fly-by-night companies).