Let's consider types, causes and consequences of structural crises .

A crisis is typical phase of medium-term waves. But there are also structural crises, which may or may not coincide with medium-term crises. In most cases they do not match, since cycle of structural crisis lasts about 10 years.

Highlight structural crises two types, depending on the reasons who gave birth to them.

1. in the country - technical or scientific-technical revolutions. Usually they manifest themselves in the fact that one group of industries is developing, while the other is stagnating.

2., processes of the world economy.

Structural crises caused by internal causes in the country, connected with long waves. These crises, on the one hand, manifest themselves in the form underproduction crises. As a rule, crises of underproduction are associated with the production of those goods and services that are directly related to the current technical revolution- demand for them increases, they become scarce, prices rise, profits grow, industries experience accelerated economic growth.

As a rule, the introduction of new products and technologies first occurs at individual enterprises and industries, and then spreads to an increasing number of industries. When the entire economy switches to a new technology, it is believed that structural crisis of underproduction ended.

At the same time, they are coming overproduction crises for those industries that occupied a leading position in the previous wave were the core of the wave. These industries are forced to rebuild in new conditions due to falling demand for their products, and learn to survive with low prices and profit margins.

Structural crises cause a revolution in the organization of production and forms of ownership. Structural crises arise when new technology comes into conflict with the existing technological method of production, and are overcome when a new technological method of production takes shape.

Structural crises caused by external causes associated with the global economic system are crises of underproduction. This energy and raw materials crises. The impetus for such crises was the behavior of a number of countries (mainly oil-producing countries), which demanded a change in the ratio of prices for their raw materials and products of industrialized countries. This leads to the emergence and development of new energy-saving and resource-saving technologies.

The policy of the United States is interesting; during the years of the oil crisis, it purchased oil from Arab countries and reduced its own production. At the same time, huge oil reserves have been explored in the depths of the United States.

INTRODUCTION

1 CONCEPT, ESSENCE AND FACTORS OF ECONOMIC CRISES

1.1 Economic cycle: concept and essence

1.2 Essence and classification of crises

2.1 Analysis of world crises of the late twentieth century

2.2 Trends in the development of structural crises

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

The relevance of this course work lies in the fact that the economic crisis is fraught with complete economic ruin and increased degradation of society. Comprehensive scientific research is necessary in order to correctly assess this painful phase in the development of social production, develop and apply reliable and effective measures to limit its duration and losses, and find ways out of the situation for the subsequent economic recovery. Solving such problems will be helped, in particular, by clarifying the patterns and interrelations of crises in the production, scientific, technical and sociocultural spheres, political and state-legal relations, and ecology.

The need to take into account the interaction of crises in the economy and other areas. The following properties can serve as guidelines for this:

Universality, inevitable in the cyclical dynamics of all elements of society. Periodic crisis shocks are a pattern of living and inanimate nature;

Usefulness - crises undermine the basis of outdated systems or their elements, clear the way for new generations of people and machines, technological and economic structures, and political systems;

Multifactoriality and multidimensionality caused by many intertwining factors, which, depending on the situation, alternately come to the fore. Crises cover various aspects of the system; they cannot be defined and measured by one general indicator, and therefore a combination of approaches is required to obtain the right benchmark. And although their classification is possible, it is impossible to find two that are identical, therefore a combination of approaches is required to obtain the correct reference point. And although their classification is possible, no two crises are identical; interaction manifested in different aspects. Crisis phases of cycles of unequal duration overlap each other, resonate, and deepen the shocks of society. Related spheres are experiencing mutual influence. Thus, an economic crisis is usually associated with a technological crisis; it is negatively affected by environmental, sociocultural, political, state and legal crises;

Finishability, which can become a transition to the improvement of society and the economy or their replacement by one or more more viable systems;

Predictability. Usually crises, especially economic ones, are unexpected; only in hindsight do they find out and prove their inevitability. Nevertheless, having learned the cyclical-genetic patterns of the dynamics of society, the logic of changing cycles, it is possible to foresee the timing and nature of the crisis.

The object of this course work is economic crises.

Subject - features of structural crises and their consequences.

Goal of the work

1. Study the history of structural crises.
2. Consider trends in the development of structural crises.
3. Analyze structural crises in Russia.

1 CONCEPT, ESSENCE AND FACTORS

ECONOMIC CRISES

1.1 Economic cycle: concept and essence

The peculiarity of a market economy, manifested in the tendency to repeat economic phenomena, was noticed back in the first half of the 19th century.

Cyclicity is the general norm of movement of a market economy, reflecting its unevenness, the change of evolutionary and revolutionary forms of economic progress, fluctuations in business activity and market conditions, the alternation of predominantly extensive or intensive economic growth; one of the determinants of economic dynamics and macroeconomic equilibrium and one of the ways of self-regulation of a market economy, including changes in its sectoral structure.

Generally speaking, the term business cycle refers to successive ups and downs in levels of economic activity over a period of years.

Currently, there is no unified theory of the cycle. The nature of the cycle is still one of the most controversial and poorly understood problems. Researchers involved in the study of market dynamics can be divided into those who do not recognize the existence of periodically repeating cycles in social life, and those who take a deterministic position and argue that economic cycles manifest themselves with the regularity of ebbs and flows. However, even among economists who recognize cyclicality, there is no unity regarding the nature of this phenomenon.

Individual economic cycles differ significantly from each other in duration and intensity. However, they all have the same phases, which are called differently by different researchers. Despite the phases common to all cycles, individual economic cycles differ significantly from each other in duration and intensity. Therefore, some economists prefer to talk about economic fluctuations, and not about cycles, because cycles, unlike fluctuations, imply regularity.

In a cycle, the economy goes through certain phases (stages), each of which characterizes a specific state of the economic system. These are the phases of crisis, depression, revival and recovery. In modern economic literature, the terminology developed by the US National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is widely used, according to which the cycle includes the following four phases: peak (peak, boom), contraction (recession, decline), bottom (depression), recovery (expansion). A graphical interpretation of the business cycle is presented in Fig. 1.

Let's consider the economic cycle (also often called the business cycle) in its typical form. It clearly breaks down into four phases. In each of them there were different dynamics of production volume, price level, employment of workers, and interest rates.

The initial phase of the circular movement is crisis. We are talking about a general periodic crisis of overproduction. At this moment, there is a decline in the level and rate of economic growth, and a reduction in the scale of product production. There are massive bankruptcies (ruins) of industrial and commercial enterprises that cannot sell the accumulated goods. Unemployment is growing rapidly and wages are falling. Credit ties in society are disrupted, the securities market is disrupted, and stock prices are falling. All entrepreneurs have an urgent need for money to pay off rapidly accrued debts, and therefore the bank interest rate increases significantly.

Then comes another phase - depression (from the Latin depressio, decrease, suppression). Then the decline in production stops, and at the same time the decline in prices. Stocks of goods are gradually decreasing. Due to insignificant demand, the supply of poor money capital increases and the bank interest rate is reduced to a minimum. During a depression, the supply of goods ceases to outpace demand; the cessation of production of goods reduces their supply to the level of demand. At the same time, natural conditions are being created to overcome the crisis. Prices for means of production decrease and credit becomes cheaper, which contributes to the resumption of expanded reproduction on a new technical basis.

In the next phase of recovery, production expands to its pre-crisis level. The size of inventory is set at the level necessary for uninterrupted supply to the market. A slight increase in prices begins, caused by an increase in consumer demand, and the scale of unemployment is reduced; the demand for money capital increases and the interest rate increases.

Finally, the recovery phase begins. During this period, production output exceeds the pre-crisis level. Unemployment is decreasing. With the expansion of consumer demand, prices of goods increase. The profitability of production increases. The demand for credit funds increases and the bank interest rate increases accordingly.

When analyzing the real reasons causing the cyclical development of the economy, three main approaches can be distinguished.

First, the nature of business cycles is explained by factors outside the economic system. These are natural phenomena, political events, psychological predicament, etc. We are talking, in particular, about cycles of solar activity, wars, revolutions and other political upheavals, about the discoveries of large deposits of valuable resources or territories, about powerful breakthroughs in technology and technology.

Secondly, the cycle is considered as an internal phenomenon inherent in the economy. Internal factors can cause both a recession. and an increase in economic activity at certain intervals. One of the decisive factors is the cyclical nature of the renewal of fixed capital. In particular, the beginning of an economic boom, accompanied by a sharp increase in demand for machinery and equipment, obviously suggests that it will repeat itself after a certain period of time, when this equipment becomes physically or morally worn out and becomes obsolete.

Thirdly, the causes of cycles are seen in the interaction of internal states of the economy and external factors. According to this point of view, external factors are considered as primary sources that provoke the entry into action of internal factors that transform the received impulses from external sources into phase fluctuations of the economic system. External sources often include the state.

The authors of some concepts focus their attention on innovation. They argue that major technological innovations, such as railroads, automobiles, or synthetic fibers, have a major impact on investment and consumer spending, and hence on output, employment, and the price level. But such major innovations appear irregularly and thereby contribute to instability in economic activity. Other scholars attribute economic cycles to political and random events. Wars, for example, can be destructive from a purely economic point of view. A truly insatiable demand for military products during hostilities can lead to overemployment and severe inflation, which, after peace and reduction in military spending, are usually followed by economic recession. There are also economists who consider the cycle to be a purely monetary phenomenon. When the government issues too much money, an inflationary boom occurs; A relatively small amount of money accelerates the decline in production and the rise in unemployment.

Despite this multiplicity of points of view, most economists believe that the factor that directly determines the levels of production and employment is the level of general, or aggregate, spending. In a primarily market-oriented economy, businesses produce goods and services only if they can be sold at a profit. Simply put, if overall costs are low, it is not profitable for many businesses to produce goods and services in large volumes. Hence the low level of production, employment and income. A higher level of total spending means that increased production generates profits, so production, employment and income will also increase. When the economy reaches full employment, real output becomes constant and additional spending simply raises the price level.

One should not conclude that all fluctuations in business activity are explained by economic cycles of one side; there are seasonal fluctuations in business activity. For example, the shopping "boom" before Christmas and Easter leads to significant annual fluctuations in the rate of economic activity, especially in retail trade, agriculture, the automotive industry, and construction are also subject to seasonal fluctuations to some extent.

Business activity also depends on the long-term trend in the economy, that is, on the increase or decrease in economic activity over a long period, such as 25, 50 or 100 years.

Different views on the causes of cyclical fluctuations also determine different approaches to solving the problem of regulating them. Despite the variety of points of view on the problem of countercyclical regulation, they can be reduced to two main approaches: Keynesian and classical.

Anti-cyclical regulation consists of a system of ways and methods of influencing the economic situation and economic activity, aimed at mitigating cyclical fluctuations. At the same time, the efforts of the state are in the opposite direction of the developing economic situation at each phase of the economic cycle.

However, two fundamental points should be emphasized. Despite all efforts, the state is unable to overcome the cyclical nature of economic development; it can only smooth out cyclical fluctuations in order to maintain economic stability. Finally, it is necessary to realize and accept cyclicality with its crisis phase as the inevitability of not only destruction, but also creation, because it is associated with the restoration of macroeconomic balance in the renewal of the economic body of the national economy.

Proponents of Keynesianism, focusing on aggregate demand, focus on the regulatory role of the state with its financial and budgetary instruments, which are used either to reduce or increase spending, or to manipulate tax rates, compress or expand the system of tax incentives. At the same time, monetary policy plays an important, but still a supporting role.

The state, using the Keynesian model of countercyclical regulation, in the phase of crisis and depression increases government spending, including expenses for enhancing investment activity, and pursues a policy of “cheap money.” In conditions of recovery, in order to prevent “overheating” of the economy and thereby smooth out the peak of the transition from recovery to recession, the same tools are used, but with the opposite sign, aimed at compressing and curtailing aggregate demand.

Supporters of the classical, or conservative, movement focus their attention on the supply side. It is about ensuring the use of available resources and creating the conditions for efficient production, withholding support from low-performing industries and sectors of the economy and promoting freedom of action of market forces.

Monetary regulation becomes the main instrument. The supply of money becomes the main lever of influence on the national economy, a means of fighting inflation. Attention is paid not to credit liberalization, but to credit restriction, i.e. pursuing a policy of “dear money” by raising interest rates, which should help combat the overaccumulation of capital. Fiscal policy is used as an auxiliary tool. A strict policy is being pursued to reduce government spending, and therefore, primarily to compress consumer demand. Tax policy is aimed at reducing tax rates and the degree of progressiveness of the tax scale. Moreover, the priority of tax measures is addressed to the business sector.

In conclusion, it should be noted that all countries with market economies, despite the commitment of their governments to certain models and development concepts, in their practical activities for state regulation of the national economy resort to the use of both Keynesian and classical methods of influencing market conditions and economic activity depending on solving short-term or long-term problems.

Each stage of the historical development of a market-capitalist economy is characterized by certain features of both the course of the economic cycles themselves and economic crises. These can be sluggish upswings and sharp, deep downturns and, conversely, sluggish downturns and intense, prolonged upswings.

Last third of the 20th century. was marked by the emergence of new specific moments in the development of economic cycles:

1. synchronization of the phases of economic cycles on a global scale, which led to the revival of world crises since the mid-70s. and in the early 80s and 90s;
2. revival of classical cycles according to their duration;
3. interweaving, in one form or another and to a degree, of cyclical crises with structural and partial crises;
4. the emergence of stagflationary phenomena, which was a fundamentally new phenomenon for the phases of crisis and depression. The main reason for this phenomenon, obviously, should be seen in the establishment of an increasing dominance of imperfect market structures in national economies, which makes it possible to manipulate prices in the direction of increasing them while simultaneously curtailing production, and, consequently, supply;
5. growing signs of a deepening global financial crisis, which puts on the agenda the problem of revising the principles and mechanisms of the functioning of financial capital.

1.2 Essence and classification of the crisis

In a developed capitalist economy, the process of reproduction of the national product has the following feature: at certain intervals its normal course is interrupted by a crisis (from the Greek krisis - turning point, outcome), which means a sharp turning point, a difficult transitional state.

A crisis is a sharp deterioration in the economic condition of the country, manifested in a significant decline in production, disruption of existing production relations, bankruptcy of enterprises, increased unemployment and, ultimately, a decrease in living standards and well-being of the population.

The whole variety of economic crises can be classified on three different grounds.

On the scale of imbalance in economic systems.

General crises cover the entire national economy.

Global crises are determined by the coverage of both individual industries and areas of economic activity on a global scale, and the entire world economy.

Partial ones apply to any one area or sector of the economy. Partial crises are associated with a decline in economic activity within large areas of activity. In particular, we are talking about money circulation and loans, the banking system, stock and foreign exchange markets. Thus, a financial crisis is a deep disorder of public finances. It manifests itself in constant budget deficits (when government expenditures exceed its revenues). An extreme manifestation of financial collapse is the insolvency of the state on foreign loans (during the global economic crisis of 1929-1933, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy stopped making payments on foreign loans. In 1931, the United States deferred all payments on foreign debts for a year). In August 1998, a huge financial crisis broke out in Russia.

A monetary crisis is a shock to the monetary system. There is a sharp reduction in commercial and bank credit, a massive withdrawal of deposits and the collapse of banks, a rush of the population and entrepreneurs for cash, a fall in stock and bond prices, as well as a decrease in the bank interest rate.

The currency crisis was expressed in the elimination of the gold standard in circulation on the world market and the depreciation of the currencies of individual countries (shortage of foreign “hard” currencies, depletion of foreign exchange reserves in banks, falling exchange rates).

A stock exchange crisis is a sharp decline in securities prices, a significant reduction in their issues, and deep downturns in the activities of the stock exchange.

Crisis phenomena in the economy can cover separate but interconnected areas; these are convergent crises. In this case, the parameters characterizing the development of a specific sphere or branch of the economy are subject to change. As a result, these crises can reinforce each other and ultimately turn into a so-called systemic crisis that covers the economy as a whole, which is expressed in a corresponding change in macroeconomic aggregates.

Convergent crises can exist in isolation, without attracting attention, that is, in this case, their presence in the economy is expressed in a decrease in the quality of individual subsystems without a significant impact on macroeconomic indicators.

According to the regularity of imbalances in the economy.

Periodic crises recur regularly at regular intervals.

Cyclical crises are periodically recurring declines in social production, causing paralysis of business and labor activity (activities) in all spheres of the national economy and giving rise to a new cycle of economic activity.

Intermediate crises are sporadically occurring declines in social production that temporarily interrupt the stages of revival and recovery of the national economy. Unlike cyclical crises, they do not give rise to a new cycle; they are interrupted at some stage, are local in nature, are less deep and less durable.

Irregular crises have their own specific causes. An industry shock affects one of the sectors of the national economy and is caused by a change in the structure of production, the breakdown of normal economic relations, etc. An example is the suspension of production in the textile industry in 1977.

An agrarian crisis is a sharp deterioration in the marketing of agricultural products (a drop in prices for agricultural products). Agrarian crises, as a rule, are caused by a combination of natural factors, omissions in the organization of labor, technical backwardness, imperfect systems of land use and land tenure, etc. Agrarian crises are distinguished by their duration and anti-cyclicality.

Structural crises are associated with a gradual and long-term increase in intersectoral imbalances in social production (one-sided and ugly development of some industries to the detriment of others, deterioration of the situation in certain types of production) and are characterized by the inconsistency of the existing structure of social production with the changed conditions for the efficient use of resources. They cause long-term shocks and require a relatively long period of adaptation to the changed conditions of the process of social reproduction for their resolution. A striking example of a global structural crisis is the energy crisis that developed in the mid-70s, which required more than 5 years for the national economies of industrialized countries to adapt to the new energy price structure.

Industry crises are characterized by declines in production and the curtailment of economic activity in one of the branches of industry or the national economy. The history of such crises can be most fully traced in the coal, steel, textile, and shipbuilding industries.

Seasonal crises are caused by the influence of climate factors that disrupt the accepted rhythm of economic activity. In particular, a delay in the onset of spring could cause a crisis in public utilities due to lack of fuel.

By the nature of the violation of reproduction proportions.

Two types are distinguished here.

The crisis of overproduction of goods is the production of an excessive amount of useful things that cannot be sold.

The crisis of underproduction of goods is their acute shortage to satisfy the effective demand of the population.

1.3 Factors influencing the course of crises

The first factor that influenced the entire course of expanded reproduction of the social product in the second half of the 20th century was the scientific and technological revolution. Under its influence, the course of crises has seriously changed, and new types have developed. On the one hand, the scientific and technological revolution has given rise to knowledge-intensive sectors of the economy that are most stable in the face of economic fluctuations (microelectronics, robotics, etc.). On the other hand, scientific and technological revolution has given rise to structural crises in traditional industries, where simple (mechanical) technology for processing natural substances predominates (coal, ferrous metallurgy, textiles, etc.)

Structural shocks are much more durable. The stagnation and decline of old industrial sectors is aggravated not only by their technical lag, but also by their low efficiency, often unprofitability. This situation can be overcome if lagging industries are updated on the basis of the latest highly efficient equipment and technology.

In addition, scientific and technological revolution significantly accelerated the turnover of fixed capital and its replacement with more advanced technology. As a result, crises began to occur more often - not after 10-12, but after 5-6 years.

The second factor is the active intervention of the state in the entire course of the economic cycle in order to achieve greater sustainability of economic development.

The first attempt to overcome the economic crisis of 1929-1933. undertaken by Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected President of the United States in 1933. The “new course” he pursued included a number of decisive steps towards state regulation of the national economy.

Subsequently, the West accumulated significant experience in implementing anti-cyclical and anti-crisis policies. As a result, crises have become less destructive. Business activity cycles often proceed without some traditional phases and develop more evenly - with a smaller depth of decline and a smaller height of rise.

In the 1990s, a new factor significantly influenced sustainable economic growth: the globalization of the world economy. The sustainable economic growth of the vast majority of countries was a consequence of increased global competition and the further free development of foreign economic relations of states. A major role in this regard is played by the rapid expansion of international trade, the growth rate of which significantly exceeds the rate of increase in the world total product.

The presence of crisis phenomena in the economy should be perceived from the following positions.

Firstly, a certain number of crises in the economy is a reflection (cost) of economic development, by analogy with sliding friction in mechanics, which ensures the movement of bodies in space. Consequently, a crisis phenomenon can have a negative and positive meaning.

Crisis is an integral element of social evolution and one of the fundamental conditions for social progress. The economic system is multi-element, so it is almost impossible to accurately predict the result of the constant interaction of its components.

Secondly, crises and disasters occur in the economy. These are mainly crisis phenomena that affect the entire economic system and lead to significant social losses (high unemployment, hyperinflation, reduction in savings, destruction of the country’s innovative potential, decline in production, disruption of the reproduction regime of fixed capital, depreciation of intellectual and other types of property, reduction in the potential of the financial and banking sectors, etc.

Economic crises have two sides. One of them is destructive. It is associated with the decisive elimination of the existing abnormal proportions in the economy. Often large surpluses of goods were barbarously destroyed.

The other side is health. It is inevitable, because during a depression, falling prices make production unprofitable: it does not give the usual, average profit. Renewing fixed capital (its active part—machinery, equipment) helps get out of this deadlock. This makes it possible to reduce the cost of manufacturing products and make them sufficiently profitable.

2 ANALYSIS OF THE STRUCTURAL CRISIS IN THE WORLD ECONOMY OF THE LAST QUARTER OF THE XX CENTURY

2.1 Analysis of world crises of the late twentieth century

The current state of the world economy shows the need to deepen the analysis of the global structural crisis occurring in it over the last quarter of the last century. Associated with it, on the one hand, is the second stage of scientific and technological revolution and the jointly intensified transition of developed countries to a post-industrial structure, and on the other hand, the prospects for the formation of post-industrial foundations within the framework of the world economy as a whole are closely related.

The stage of globalization, initiated by the creation of a post-industrial structural state of the economy of developed countries, will inevitably be forced to go through a further series of scientific and technological revolution, including those intersecting with global structural crises in accordance with the logic of the long-wave dynamics of now post-industrial development. The latter is the still unknown essence of the long-term trajectory of the formation of post-industrial content in the world economy as a whole, and that is why, in order to improve the forecast functions of the macroeconomic policy of national economies, it is necessary to deepen the analysis of the first global structural crisis that occurred on the post-industrial basis of knowledge-intensive industries.

Meanwhile, the end of the 20th century showed the insufficiency of the analysis carried out parallel to the unfolding of the crisis by domestic economic science, and the latter’s transition to the basis of the “Economics” methodology further alienated it from conclusions useful for practice on the modernization that has taken place in the world. Such a discrepancy between the theoretical methodology now accepted as the norm in Russia and the practical needs for the progressive modernization of the country’s economy was expressed in a number of significantly significant points.

1. The global nature of the structural and economic crisis that began in the mid-70s turned out to be unknown. Soviet political economy did not notice its continuation since the sharp drop in 1985 in prices on the world oil market affecting developing countries and the USSR itself, considering the crisis over. Ideological dominance in political economy prevented the causal approach from moving to a new level of depth of analysis, and therefore not only was the global component of the domestic crisis not identified, but the analysis of the development of the world economy itself was not brought to the level of the specifics of its continuation in developing countries associated with the global nature of the crisis .
2. The peculiarity of the transition of the structural crisis to the developing countries exporting raw materials to the world market, who find themselves broke, remained undiscovered due to the erroneous identification in the causal analysis of the rise in world fuel and raw material prices as the source of the crisis and its causes. As a result, the global innovation wave of the second stage of scientific and technological revolution that arose parallel to the crisis, which with the discovery of the microprocessor provided the technological basis for the unfolding of the structural crisis, remained in the analysis only at the superficial level of highlighting the emergence of knowledge-intensive industries. Meanwhile, the connections between scientific and technological revolution and economic modernization are systemic, and it was its microprocessor stage that not only eased the consequences of adaptation to the crisis and subsequent modernization of the economies of developed countries, but also became an additional source of the transition of the crisis to the level of developing countries. The latter, with the fall in fuel and raw material prices, found themselves in a situation of simultaneous reduction in sources of income and the absence of sustainable profitable investment niches, captured already in the course of modernization adaptation to the scientific and technological revolution by developed countries.
3. The depth of the structural content of the global crisis that has spread to developing countries is not only unknowable from the standpoint of the dominance of the “Economics” methodology established in modern Russian economic theory, but also implies, in the absence of its knowledge, the fatal reproduction in the future of the causes of the lag at a new, higher level. Regarding the Economics methodology, what is permissible for the theory of the evolution of market economies in developed countries turns out to be completely insufficient for developing recommendations on economic policy in the economies of developing countries. We are talking about the prevailing purely functional approach to the structural crisis on the basis of the course "Economics", which identified this crisis with a "supply shock", and the emerging stagflation, structural in content, with "inflation caused by a violation of the supply mechanism", regardless of the nature of this violation and the corresponding cost inflation , in the decline phase. In this interpretation of the crisis, it is impossible to detect a new trend in the development of the world economy as a whole, aimed at the constancy of structural modernization as a new quality of structural changes in national economies in search of sources for restructuring their status in the global system of world economic relations. This trend has its own source of emergence precisely from the moment of intertwining of the structural crisis with the wave of scientific and technological revolution with the corresponding intertwining of structural and cyclical crises analyzed by Soviet political economy in the course of establishing the dominance of the post-industrial basis in the economic structure of developed countries.
4. The tendency towards a permanent restructuring of the status role of national economies in the world economy on the basis of their structural modernization follows both from the effect of the change in structural subordination in the economic system that occurred during the crisis, and from the nature of the global structural crisis (its causes). In the first case, we are talking about the consequence of the emergence of the service sector, designed at the industrial stage of technologies dominant in the creation of goods to be a secondary sphere in relation to the production of basic material goods, to the role of the main sphere of attraction of labor, capital and the total value created in the national economy (GNP).

As a result, having remained at the unshakable-eternal level of addition to production activities to satisfy the primary material needs of people, the sphere of intangible activity has radically changed all structural subordination in the substantive aspects of economic growth factors. Thus, the global innovative demand for the activity of processing information resources that transforms into innovations has become the initial basic structural link in the reproduction of national economies, and information has become their basic resource, more important for growth factors than the previous raw material base of industrial production. In the structure of the world economy as a whole, the post-industrial nature of the national economy began to be determined by the dominance of services in the structure of the latter as a general background (base) for the possibility of real post-industrialization of the national economy in the form of the predominance in it of the creation of intellectual capital and organizational services, mainly export-oriented. In the structure of intra-company activities, the organizational sphere of information processing and analysis began to play the role of decisive criteria for the growth of the competitiveness of the company as a whole and its products, replacing in this place the industrial-technological criterion of mass production of maximizing output through the concentration of resource processing capacities.

Countries that do not have either a sufficient degree of market automation to take these trends into account in the dynamics of their national economy due to the underdevelopment of their economy and rejection of their partnership by developed countries, or their own alternative standard market concept (base) of economic theory, will be forced to consistently lower its global economic status in a series of constant restructuring also due to the special content of post-industrial trends in the development of the world economy. We are talking about the content of the structural restructuring of the world economy, revealed through an analysis of the nature of the structural crisis, as the transition of capitalization relations to the global level.

The level of world economic relations is always lagging in relation to the trends unfolding in the intranational economic environment. Therefore, just as during the period of the formation of the universal rules of the market-capitalist game, he showed the clearest example of the establishment of pre-capitalist, essentially vassal-colonial dependence of countries, so in the post-industrial world he is still only establishing the “universal capitalist rules of the game” (world-level standards of legal and financial and economic institutions). The latter already structure entire countries and blocks of interconnected production chains as personifiers of physical and mechanical labor in relation to the advanced carriers of technological processes of intellectual-transforming capital.

The global structural crisis played a decisive role in initiating such restructuring within the global economy. At the same time, the cause of the crisis was not the rise in corresponding prices on the world market, predetermined by the previous massive resource-wasteful petrochemical use of basic raw materials of industrial production, as was interpreted earlier, but its deep basis overcome with the help of this source of crisis in the form of a macroeconomic crisis in unproductive conditions of the intellectual and information direction the first stage of scientific and technological revolution of the 50s in the areas of application of labor resources. The redistribution of the latter into the production of computer-technological methods of information processing, showing the connection between the scientific and technological revolution of the 50s and 70s as stages of a single process in content, became the beginning of global restructuring with the now constant goal of saving resources at the mega-level of the world economy as a whole.

The restructuring of intersectoral relations based on the predominant focus of the fuel and raw material industrial base on new high-tech technologies by reducing the dependence of the economy on the degree of consumption of these resources in the structure of the created GNP (resource intensity of the product) became a crisis-resolving method only for developed countries, and the deployment of restructuring itself moved to the level of search relations further “wandering” cores of post-industrial development. In order to search for new sustainable profitable areas of investment, it was precisely the stage of securing the “intellectual rent” for the developed countries that received it that was required, and such a global restructuring on the transfer-cost basis of the movement of financial flows is predetermined by the lack of a technological base for production processes within the world economy as a whole. Until the technology of post-industriality has been brought to the direct participation of the overwhelming majority of households within the framework of production relations with their counterparties from anywhere on the planet, the world economy will primarily reveal the redistributive aspects of the restructuring of national economies, in which the paternalistic abilities of state management of agents are the decisive criteria for their potential take some promising leading position in the global status-market competition. In this regard, the reviving interest in the natural resources of national territories is nothing more than an interest in the redistribution of spheres of control over global sources of raw materials between developed countries, which is never adequate to an equal partnership.

The constancy of the global restructuring of economic relationships between micro- and macro-agents follows from the perspective of the sphere of further cognitive-transforming activity of human civilization as a whole outlined by scientific and technological revolution. We are talking about the exploration of outer space beyond the planet and the interdependent self-knowledge of both individuals and communities of transformative people. In this light, the entire post-communist era of development of the Russian economy and its economic theory looks like the biggest paradox of self-destruction, since one of the promising “know-how” tools for further fundamental discoveries is precisely the systemic-dialectical method of Marxist theory with its causal basis, discarded during the reforms analysis. The latter, in contrast to factor-functional analysis, is more suitable as a means of putting forward probabilistic hypotheses, the means of proving or disproving which only research tools adopted from foreign methodology can serve as a means of proving or disproving.

The point here is that for the first time in the entire history of mankind, the three most general fundamental sciences became responsible for the cardinal discoveries of scientific and technological revolution - philosophy in terms of formal logic related to it, physical quantum mechanics and mathematics (system theory and data processing). Their integrative action was the starting point of scientific and technological revolution, and the main promising areas of new scientific and technological revolution have already been initially outlined by specialists in quantum mechanics in the form of four unknown quantum phenomena outside of physics. And if among three of them (Feynman’s quantum computer, the study of the unconscious, as well as biology, animal behavior and brain function) in the last mentioned direction, genetics is now creating the prerequisites for the clustering of discoveries into a new stage of scientific and technological progress with the inclusion in the last block of industrial sectors responsible for its implementation , then the fourth direction - the theory of social processes - directly concerns the humanities.
The structural crisis, with its global environmental consequence in this regard, precisely shows a sharp increase in the need to strengthen the forecasting functions of determining the consequences of various options for the development of civilization, in which dialectical logic is capable, thanks to the principle of a systematic approach to the analysis of phenomena purified from dogmatism, to act as a predictive and anticipatory predictor of many discoveries. Of course, the change in the decisive criterion for the effectiveness of human capital knowledge from “know-how” to “know-that” (“know-what”) must go through the stage of the emergence of technological innovations that magnetically attract blocks of dialectical logic of computer recognition in text symbols for describing processes by various sciences, subject to the presence of such a logical pattern. However, the possibilities of temporary non-technological analysis and putting forward anticipatory hypotheses of the relationship between phenomena are probably already available (for example, based on this logic, it was not difficult to make a probabilistic forecast about the connection between earthquakes and atmospheric pressure over a given territory, without waiting for specialists in natural sciences to evolve put forward this hypothesis on the basis of their theories). A similar perspective is also indicated by the spread of postmodern philosophy, which breaks the usual framework of stereotypes of painstakingly slow evolutionary thinking, since an advanced forecast, then tested on the principle of the absence of “Lysenkoism,” can not only save time for developing innovations, but also make a previously unpromising country the focus of world flows.” intellectual rent" for the proposed series of predictive "know-how".

In this regard, the independent aspect of the usefulness of dialectical logic within the framework of the theory of quantum mechanics itself and the modern stage of computerization is also preserved. Regarding the latter, one of the probabilistic consequences of the use of new magnetic-computer technologies for recognizing the patterns of dialectical logic in the analyzed texts may be a structural crisis in the content of computer activity associated with the overload of databases with consumer information provided through the network that is unproductive under the new conditions of production and computer work.

Within the framework of quantum mechanics, which perhaps requires structuring according to the principle of a chemical table, even at the level of amateurism, but in accordance with dialectical logic, one can assume that the conclusion of quantum physics about the eternity of self-reproduction of the Universe is exaggerated. And this is already capable, at the level of hypotheses, of revolutionizing the idea of ​​material of a higher order (level) in relation to the planet as a uniquely material, and not an ideal, object. The well-known expression from religion about God as the image and likeness of man can in this case move from the abstract-ideal to the level of the materially meaningful and physically outlined. If such logic at least approximately reflects the realities of the as yet unknown reality of the Universe as a “living” developing organism, with the help of some areas of sciences separated from each other, it will be possible to read the “genetic code” of explanations of real processes embedded in other sciences. Moreover, for example, not only the material may turn out to be only a form of development of an ideal higher level of coverage of one system by another, but also the human “soul”, unknowable at the level of physical matter, may well receive evidence of its existence at the level of development... “the history of mankind as an approximate semantic analogue of the soul of this higher level of coverage of global systemic connections of a developing organism."
Of course, the latest hypothetical constructions do not yet have a basis for their confirmation or refutation, but what sometimes appeared as crazy and absurd sometimes found its confirmation and approval in the further evolution of knowledge. The structural crisis of the end of the 20th century precisely gives the main lesson to humanity in the form of the need to save resources in order to accelerate the knowledge of phenomena before humanity’s global exploration of outer space.

2.2 Trends in the development of structural crises

The key problem of modern humanity is its growing division, which has a multi-level nature, occurring simultaneously along a number of lines. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, humanity achieved an exceptionally high level of integration for the then level of development. This integration, having eliminated internal barriers in markets, extremely (up to the outbreak of a world war) intensified competition between the most developed countries and led to a deep segmentation of humanity.

All global economic growth after World War II relied on the gradual elimination of this segmentation, until the Western victory in the Cold War ended it completely.

However, the new elimination of barriers in world markets (fashionable comparisons of the depth of integration of the beginning and end of the twentieth century are incorrect, since at the end of it the most significant was integration in the services market, rudimentary at its beginning) gave rise to new sets of insurmountable problems and, accordingly, a new wave of segmentation.

It is just beginning, and its course - and even more so its consequences - require careful analysis, but it is already clear that the old model of “growth through integration”, which ensured the development of mankind throughout the entire post-war period, has been exhausted. Until a new development model is formed (and this is being done gropingly and, accordingly, slowly and inconsistently), high rates of development and, especially, sustainable growth - at least for developed countries that form the bulk of the world economy - will have to be forgotten. The segmentation of humanity goes in several directions at once, according to several criteria.

On the surface lies the division between successfully developing and undeveloped countries (“between the rich and the poor”, “between the golden billion and so far two, and tomorrow more billions, burned alive in the furnace of the prosperity of Western civilization”). The progress of the West and the successful countries of Asia is all too noticeable against the backdrop of a dying Africa, convulsing Latin America, stagnating Japan for the second decade, and degrading South-Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space.

No later than the beginning of the 90s, the gap between developed countries and the rest of the world finally took on a technological character: modern technologies are too complex and expensive for relatively undeveloped countries to not only create, but even apply. This deprives them of the very opportunity to work effectively - and, therefore, deprives them of a future in a global competitive environment.

Developed countries are aware of this problem mainly through the prism of the “digital divide,” which limits the markets for the complex and therefore expensive high-tech products they (more precisely, their corporations) produce, and, consequently, the possibilities for their technological progress. However, in reality the problem is deeper: the increase in the efficiency of information technology has led to a classic “crisis of overproduction” of information (in the broad sense of the word) services. Their volume is too large even for global markets. This is precisely the deepest reason for the systemic structural crisis that is now engulfing the economies of developed countries and the world economy as a whole.

The expansion of global markets is hampered not only by the poverty of the majority of the population of developing countries, but also by a cultural barrier: technologies of propaganda and even information processing developed for one civilizational paradigm are not perceived within the framework of another. The result is a reduction in the flow of resources for the further progress of Western information technologies.

Naturally, developed countries will make every effort to, if not resolve, then at least mitigate this crisis, which not only deprives them of the prospects of maintaining undisputed global leadership (due to reduced funding for technology development), but also gives rise to significant internal problems, having already launched the process of marginalization of part of the middle class - the process of transforming the “society of two-thirds” into a “society of half.”

In the short term, they will try to overcome the crisis primarily by trying to stimulate the development of poor countries in the typical humanitarian-UN style. Their direct contradiction to the current interests of almost all key forces in developed countries and the exceptional complexity of the task itself doom them to failure.

Medium-term measures to solve the problem will be, first of all, attempts to stimulate the “cultural expansion” of developed countries to expand information markets by removing the “cultural barrier.” Practice shows that such actions, inevitably encroaching on the civilizational identity of the societies being developed, lead to the destruction of weak societies and confrontation between the West and the strong.

Therefore, they are inextricably linked with another medium-term method of mitigating the crisis - with the escalation of military-political tension in the world to stimulate military scientific and technological developments (which, sadly, serve as the most effective method of government stimulation of science and technology).

Ultimately, all of these approaches are insufficient. The most likely way to overcome the crisis (if we forget about the apocalyptic forecasts of a relatively painless euthanasia of non-Western civilizations - by analogy with modern Africa and tomorrow's Russia) is a qualitative reduction in the cost and simplification of modern technologies. However, the question of the areas of application of these "closing" technologies (they will "close" not only industries, but also, accordingly, entire countries), the pace of their spread and the nature of their influence on the specific pattern of international competition remains open.

The emergence and transformation of such a phenomenon as the “cultural barrier” into a significant factor in international competition makes the answer to another question posed by Toynbee increasingly obvious. The division of humanity occurs not only according to the technologies used and the level of well-being, but also along civilizational lines.

Socialism and capitalism competed within the framework of a single cultural-civilizational paradigm, and the force field created by the bipolar confrontation kept the rest of humanity within its framework, exerting a powerful transformative influence on it. The disappearance of the bipolar system destroyed this force field, releasing two civilizational and cultural initiatives at once: Islamic, which carries a powerful social charge, and Chinese. (It is significant that due to the combination of traditions and demographic regulation, almost 15% more boys are born than girls, which contributes to an increase in the general level of aggressiveness of Chinese society, which, with effective management, results in external expansion).

Global competition is rapidly acquiring the character of competition between civilizations - and the nightmarish meaning of this everyday fact is only just beginning to be realized by humanity. The easiest way to understand it is by analogy with interethnic conflicts, the incitement of which is a crime of particular gravity due to their irrationality: they are difficult to extinguish, since the parties exist in different value systems and therefore cannot agree.

The participants in the competition between civilizations are divided even more deeply than the parties to the interethnic conflict. Not only do they pursue different goals with different methods, but they also fail to understand each other's values, goals, and methods. The financial expansion of the West, the ethnic expansion of China and the religious expansion of Islam are not just unfolding on different planes; they do not accept each other as a deeply alien phenomenon, hostile not because of their different attitudes to the key issue of any social development - the question of power - but because of their very way of life. Compromise is possible only in the event of a change in lifestyle, that is, destruction as a civilization.

Such competition is not simply carried out in relation to each of its participants by methods that are extra-systemic for him and therefore are of a painful and destructive nature; it is uncompromising in nature and grows even with apparent equality of forces and the absence of chances for anyone’s significant success.

It is irrational - and therefore dangerous and destructive. Each of the three great civilizations, penetrating into the other, does not enrich, but corrodes and undermines it (classic examples are the ethnic split in American society and the inherent instability of pro-Western regimes in Islamic countries).

Perhaps in the next decade Islam will become China's "icebreaker" in relation to the West, just as Hitler's Germany and, ultimately, Stalin's USSR became the "icebreaker" of Roosevelt's United States in relation to Europe.

At the same time, consideration of the traditional world “triangle of civilizational forces” (West - Islam - China) is becoming less and less sufficient. It seems that we are witnessing an even more dramatic act of the beginning of the division of the West than the clash of Western and Islamic civilizations - the beginning of a divergence between the EU and the United States.

Indeed, fierce economic competition plays an absolutely subordinate role here: the aggression against Yugoslavia, which was detrimental to the European economy, and the events of September 11, when the EU saved the American financial system, quite convincingly prove that for Europeans, close economic ties with the United States decisively dominate over economic competition with them.

The ongoing demarcation, visible in a myriad of small details, but most of all in the different attitude towards Iraq, testifies not to a political, but to a much more subtle and at the same time deeper ideological and value divergence between the two societies.

The American one is focused primarily on ensuring its own competitiveness. The rule that prevents him from achieving this goal is sincerely perceived as an outdated misunderstanding and discarded. The USA is a boxer who does not use a knife in the ring, not because it is not accepted, but because it will count as a defeat.

European society strives to live according to an established set of principles (it should be noted, generally reasonable and humane) that provide it with the most comfortable and prosperous life. This dooms him to passivity, dogmatism, collaboration - yesterday in the face of the “Soviet threat”, today in the face of an expansionist Islam - and relative weakness in world competition.

However, it would be a deep mistake to write off Europe in advance, even taking into account its internal inefficiency and heterogeneity. We should not forget that her collaborationism and tendency to avoid conflicts can lead her to the very hill from which the prosperous monkey of the Chinese stratagem has been watching the battle of successive tigers for several millennia.

When assessing the competitiveness of civilizations, it is important to take into account that modern technologies paradoxically give new vitality to archaic social organisms that:

* due to their archaic or primitive nature, they do not perceive many destructive technologies developed to restrain modern social mechanisms (for example, traditions are the best weapon against propaganda), and are protected from a number of modern challenges (for example, neglect of human rights allows prohibitively cruel punishment for drug trafficking and organized crime) ;

* effectively uses modern technologies;

* receive a rapidly expanding social base due to the emergence of a technological gap between societies and within developed societies and, therefore, an increase in the proportion of people who do not have life and social prospects (for example, Islam is rapidly occupying the niche vacated by communism as its movement, taking on itself its socio-psychological function of striving for justice).

The deterioration of the market situation intensifies competition: in an era of prosperity it is fought for an extra piece, in an era of crises - for survival. The global economy of the 90s - an era of rapid prosperity for developed countries due to the digestion of the resources of the socialist system - was also an era of global competition.

Economic integration and the removal of barriers in markets, which reached its logical conclusion in the era of globalization, made global competition comprehensive and all-pervasive and turned it into its own opposite - from a tool for educating, developing and stimulating inefficient economies, it turned into a weapon for their mass destruction.

In global markets, devoid of internal barriers (both between regions of the world and between traded goods), due to their natural development, global monopolies emerged, which immediately began to rot. The fruits of this decay were initially thrown back to weaker, developing countries, but already in the spring of 2000, troubles also spread to developed economies.

Another manifestation of the decay of global monopoly is the cessation of the automatic weakening of the main problems of humanity (poverty, illiteracy, disease, discrimination, environmental pollution) as wealth increases mechanically. The 90s became the first decade of modern history when the economic successes of humanity “as a whole” were accompanied by a serious worsening of its problems. This clearly indicated the objective need to change the paradigm of human development.

These alarming symptoms manifested themselves during the rise of the world economy. In the coming years, as global economic conditions worsen, we should expect global competition to become tougher and acquire a more destructive (for the weak) character.

In light of this, forecasts of a twofold increase in global energy consumption by 2020 (and, accordingly, the threat of their shortage) are a sign not so much of this growth itself as of the high probability of destruction of the economies of the countries of Southeast Asia, which account for the bulk of the increase in energy consumption, their strategic more developed competitors.

The general consequence of increased competition is the narrowing of opportunities for weaker participants. Any less efficient production will be destroyed and lost; Accordingly, those with either the highest production efficiency or unique advantages (primarily resources) will be able to participate in competition.

In global markets, such increased competition would mean the physical elimination of more than half of humanity as employed in obviously inefficient industries. The deliberate unreality of such a significant catastrophe for a living organism such as humanity makes us assume that a way out will be found. Its most likely direction is the transition from globalization to regionalization, that is, from the formation of a single global market to the creation of a system of regional markets, separated not so much by natural as by political and administrative boundaries. Within their framework, due to the reduced intensity of competition, relatively less efficient societies will be able not only to exist, but also to develop.

The transition to regionalization will be long and difficult. In addition, the weaker the societies of a region, the more permeable its economic borders will be to global competition - and the less effective regionalization will be.

Another direction of tightening global competition is the addition of competition in sales markets with tougher competition in resource markets. Our country faced it when it discovered that the ability to produce the world's best, for example, military aircraft, means nothing without the ability to provide the necessary human, financial and material resources for the corresponding production, which quickly flow into other areas of production.

It turned out, for example, that without serious efforts on the part of the state it is impossible to produce a simply good car from excellent metal: this method of using metal is relatively less effective than that used by competing industries - and, therefore, the metal will go to them. The same is with finance (16), and with technology, and with the workforce (including managers and intellectuals). Russia still has two unique advantages: the space to provide the trans-Eurasian railway necessary for world trade, and mineral resources that are the last untouched natural reserve on our planet. The general tightening of competition for development resources means that in the near future our society will have to prove, at least to the main participants in global competition, if not its ability to use these resources, then at least its ability to own them.

Our right to own the unique opportunity to create a trans-Eurasian railway has been called into question by the entrenchment of American influence in Central Asia. Despite the strategic rivalry, the United States and China can agree on a railway transit route that skirts the territory of Russia - not out of harm, but out of economic feasibility and an understandable desire to avoid social degradation and political and administrative chaos growing in this territory. In this case, Russia will lose the most important integrating factor and, from the bridge between Europe and Southeast Asia, which it now potentially is, will turn into a collection of useless third-rate outskirts of participants in global competition.

The development of the natural resources of Siberia and the Far East under international rather than Russian control has been an open topic of discussion among American experts since at least 1996. At the same time, a generalization of the pictures of the ideal world order, to which key participants in international competition implicitly (and often unconsciously) strive, gives approximately the same scheme. According to it, the power of the Russian state is limited to the European part of Russia (17), in which a state that is completely European in appearance has been formed - a kind of hybrid of Portugal and Poland. The natural resources of Siberia and the Far East are under external control and are exploited by the authors of the corresponding approach.

Transnational corporations are even willing to pay taxes through Moscow - partly for the sake of maintaining relative civilization in Muscovy, which is losing its sources of livelihood, partly due to obviously more favorable business conditions.

It is significant that large Russian corporations, already forced to make decisions based on their positioning in the field of the described interests, as a rule, are oriented as the most preferable to the interests of the West - not only as the closest civilizationally, but also as the only development-oriented participant in global competition business. The upcoming clash of interests of the West (the US and the EU will probably act separately), China and Islamic civilization on the territory of Russia should at least be regulated, directed and balanced by the Russian state, which is one of the participants in the competition and is able to understand the specifics of the territory being developed. Without this, the clash will become not only spontaneous, but also inadequate to the nature of the disputed resources and could become destructive not only for our society, but for all of humanity.

An important and underestimated factor in competition for resources is climate change. Its scale, speed and causality will remain a field of debate for a long time, but the presence of its changes is recognized by any person with a memory that has not been lost by transformations.

Climate change will pose the threat of destruction to many prosperous societies that have significant resources and are able to use them to extract “climate rents” from weak societies that climate change will move to more favorable conditions. The former include, for example, the United States and many Islamic states, the latter, for example, Russia.

An important factor in global competition is the expansion of the range of its subjects, including through structures that are difficult to observe and even completely unobservable.

Thus, transnational corporations have long become a significant supranational force. As a rule, they strive to realize the interests of the “home country” (that is, the location of their headquarters). At the same time, they occupy a “strong position” in the world economy, corresponding to the position of the United States among other countries, due to which their interests, ideology and style of competition are closest to the American ones. It is also important that the United States has created the most perfect mechanism for the symbiosis of large corporations with the state, due to which their policies and interests, if not the same, then, in any case, complement each other in the most harmonious way.

At the same time, a significant part of transnational corporations (especially those operating in the financial sector) operate within the framework of groups and alliances that are not always formalized and often fundamentally unobservable. Combined with the weakness of the surveillance system of the global economy and transnational business in general, this in most cases makes the latter invulnerable to national and international bureaucracies "invisible".

The subjects of global competition are individual regions of certain countries, which, due to the possession of significant resources and effective management, turn out to be more successful than their countries as a whole, and actually act independently.

A significant, albeit hidden role in modern competition is played by various structures operating by non-economic methods (many of them do not even strive for profit, but for power or influence in its pure form). These are religious and criminal organizations, as well as structures focused on solving specific problems (such as the anti-globalization and environmental movements).

This same group of organizations includes the intelligence services of a number of countries (including developed and most developed ones), which have a significant degree of independence. The source of this independence is, firstly, the more widespread practice of “self-financing special operations” (which largely fuels the global drug trade, illegal trade in weapons and technology) and, secondly, the implementation of too sensitive and not publicized interests that do not allow publicity (and these interests are of both a national and private nature, including the interests of corporations and the private interests of senior officials of the relevant states and intelligence services).

Simplification of the communication process, which made it possible to create very effective network structures distributed not only geographically, but also legally (which allows minimizing legal risk), has sharply increased the influence of all non-state participants in global competition.

Moreover: for the first time, it made it possible for an individual, not forming any organization, to exert a very significant influence on society, without them doomed to complete powerlessness (a classic, although extreme example is the case of the Unabomber).

The new structure of competition, which determines and will continue to determine in the coming years the global environment in which Russia will exist, is practically not analyzed. Meanwhile, the use of standard approaches excludes from consideration a number of important subjects of this competition and, as a result, makes both the analysis and the conclusions derived from it inadequate.

Contemporary global competition (a particular, albeit fundamental, structuring case of which is competition between civilizations) is conducted by heterogeneous subjects existing on different planes, pursuing incomparable goals and using heterogeneous methods. Due to fundamental differences in the value system and mode of action, they are not able to understand each other, and therefore, to come to a long-term (not tactical, concluded for the sake of achieving a local goal) agreement.

The common denominator to which their efforts boil down is their influence on the development of humanity. In business, this role is played by profit, but global competition is supra-economic in nature and is fought to impose its development model on the world. Material wealth turns out to be a natural result of final success and a pleasant, but only by-product of partial success. In this respect, modern global competition resembles biological competition: its meaning is expansion in its purest form.

When comparing the strengths of competitive participants, one should focus not so much on the scale of their activities (although this in itself serves as an important resource - a guarantee of sustainability), but on the scale of “liquid” resources released. It is necessary to take into account all the resources, including organizational, intellectual and communicative ones, that a participant in competition can free up to participate in it at different moments and for different periods.

Irreplaceable resources are the possession of technology and a propensity for aggression (strategic defense is the only guaranteed path to defeat).

The spread of consciousness-shaping technologies has undermined the effectiveness of public and corporate management systems that are not adapted to them. Their common vices were self-programming, detachment from reality, focusing on propaganda instead of solving real problems, and isolating themselves from society.

However, the challenge posed to them by the technologies of consciousness formation at least a decade ago could not remain unanswered and has already given rise to a desire to restore the internal integrity of a controlled society, at least in certain significant parameters.

This desire gives rise to an intensification of the processes of delegation of responsibility and a shift in the attention of management science from the transformation of traditional pyramidal organizational structures to the construction of independent network structures. The latter are managed not so much by direct influences as by changes in the environment of their functioning (primarily the information and financial components of this environment).

The ultimate expression of this tendency is attempts to develop a theory of heuristic control (as opposed to conventional control based on formal logic).

At the same time, it cannot be ruled out that, along with the conscious improvement of people management systems, their spontaneous evolution is also taking place as certain entities, the elements of which are the officials who form them and, not necessarily, the managed structures. The analogies between the functioning of organizations and living organisms are quite obvious and reinforce the fact that many effective actions of organizations that ensure the achievement of their goals are not realized not only by employees, but even by the leaders of these organizations.

Accepting the hypothesis about the formation of a transpersonal “collective mind” in organizations (and even more so in societies) allows us to assume that the spread of technologies for the formation of consciousness is not a challenge to it, but a means of increasing its effectiveness, an important stage in its self-development. In this case, outdated management technologies that do not correspond to these technologies will be swept away not simply because of their ineffectiveness, but as shackles that prevent the self-realization of the collective mind.

The speed of their replacement with new control technologies, which not only maintain efficiency in conditions of massive and chaotic use of technologies for the formation of consciousness, but also use them to increase their efficiency, will become one of the key factors of competitiveness in the next decade.

In the next decade, the primary condition for the competitiveness of a society will no longer be the efficiency of public administration, as it is now, but the preservation and deepening of social identity itself. A special role will be played by improving and maintaining a sustainable system of social values ​​that effectively motivate society to achieve success in global competition.

A society that does not recognize itself as a separate entity participating in brutal competition, as well as a society in which the dominant system of motivation is not focused on collective success in this competition, is doomed to defeat and ultimately to destruction.

An example of this is provided not only by the USSR, but also by many “finished countries”, which a quarter of a century ago were, although not the most developed, territories that were stable, united and possessing certain positive prospects.

The self-identification of the Soviet people, based on the monstrous sacrifices of the civil and Great Patriotic Wars, as well as on the collective success during the “thaw” period (a social, technological and ideological breakthrough, symbolized by Yu. Gagarin’s flight), collapsed during the Gorbachev “catastrophe”. Today, Russian society is faced with the need to acquire a new self-identification, which, as history shows, is by no means a fundamentally insoluble task.

Thus, the self-identification of American society was undermined not only before the Civil War of 1861-1865, but also more recently - in the late 60s (when the slogan “unite us!” addressed to Nixon was not only an election exaggeration).

Restoring the self-identification of Russian society, “gaining subjectivity,” the need for which is acutely felt even now, can only proceed on the basis of the idea of ​​“constructive revenge” in global competition and through a deep re-ideologization of society. Ideology alone is capable of uniting social and national groups into a single team, unitedly participating in the global battle for markets and resources, and, ultimately, for the future. It is also the only generator of enthusiasm, which increases tenfold both the physical, administrative, and intellectual forces of society.

Ideology is decisively different from religion and nationalism in its openness, readiness to use the maximum number of potential allies as a resource, and the desire not to push any of them into the arms of competitors on formal grounds. Having initially emerged in a social capacity, as a tool of class consciousness and class struggle, ideology, as social relations developed, expanded to the concept of a “way of life,” brilliantly implemented in the United States and not fully in Soviet society. “Lifestyle” as an ideology makes it possible to reduce rejected members of society to a meaningful minimum, to those who are truly incompatible with the goals and values ​​of this society. Thus, ensuring the greatest integrity, ideology also ensures the most complete use of the human resources of a given society.

One of the fundamental reasons for the success of the United States is precisely the exceptional ideologization of American society. Back in 1837, the aspiring politician A. Lincoln first put forward the thesis about the need for a “political religion” that respects the Constitution and laws of the United States as religious dogma. Subsequently, after the Civil War, American society developed such a “civil religion”, introducing religious rigidity and normativity into the sphere of issues of fundamental importance for the survival of society in its internal life. At the same time, “civil religion,” uniting people of different faiths on the basis of their loyalty to the interests of society, essentially became the prototype of modern social ideologies.

In modern Russia, an attempt to restore the integrity of society is still counterproductive. After the collapse of the ideology focused on the formation of a “new historical community of people - the Soviet people,” and attempts to replace it with the ideology of triumphant speculators, which was obviously unsuitable for the entire society, public self-awareness fell to the primary, national level. Since this is mortally dangerous for a multinational country, the state (if we forget about the anecdotal attempts of the Yeltsin period) instinctively tried to ensure social unity at a higher than national level - at the level of religion.

Indeed, Russia not only survived during the period of feudal fragmentation and the Tatar-Mongol yoke, but also developed until Peter the Great created a national bureaucracy precisely on a religious, Orthodox basis. But the path that was advanced five centuries ago is today turning into its opposite, since Russia unites representatives of all the great religions of the world and atheists. Division into more than a hundred nationalities is less destructive than division into several faiths due to:

* blurring of national feeling (especially among the predominant nation - the Russians), smoothed over by the far-reaching formation of a supranational community - the Soviet people;

* quantitative and especially cultural dominance of Russians, although undermined by the massive invasion of more active and united refugees from the post-Soviet space;

* that division into many relatively small groups that check and balance each other is less threatening to integrity than division into several large groups that are inevitably rigidly separated from each other. An ideology capable of uniting the country does not yet exist in explicit form. Meanwhile, many indirect signs - and, in particular, the resounding success of the "Vladimir Putin" project of late 1999 - early 2000, underestimated by intelligent observers - suggest that the foundations of this unifying and motivating ideology have already been spontaneously developed by society.

Its essence is a harmonious combination of the inalienable vital rights of the individual and the need for patriotism as the only possible instrument for ensuring these rights in conditions of external competition. The understanding of the need for these components is quite clear, since it was inherited from Soviet society, which consistently and generally successfully implemented them. Today this ideology has been developed at the level of sensations and understanding and only needs articulation, which is an integral function of the social elite.

Just as the state is the brain and hands of society, the elite - the set of people who participate in making significant decisions or are role models - serves as its central nervous system, selecting incentive impulses and transmitting them to the corresponding groups of social muscles.

Today's Russian elite is not able to cope with its functions not so much because of the corruption caused by the prolonged robbery and destruction of its own country, but because of the enervating cynicism caused by this.

The lack of ideals and enthusiasm, the inability to inspire society to solve key problems makes the Russian elite a collection of “pique vests” who want nothing (except for personal well-being) and cannot do anything. Therefore, a categorical requirement for Russia’s survival in global competition is the renewal of the elite in the process of articulating the creative ideology that has already been discovered by society.

In the process of this renewal, the social elite, in addition to inspiration, must also gain adequacy. The significance of such a banal requirement is usually underestimated, although for the modern Russian elite, accustomed to a level of comfort unimaginable just 10 years ago in exchange for realizing the interests of stronger participants in global competition (instead of national interests), it means, among other things, significant material sacrifices.

In particular, the criterion for the practical patriotism of the national elite is the form of its savings: no matter what high motives its members are guided by, as a whole it is doomed to act in the interests of preserving and increasing its own assets (material or intangible - influence, status and reputation in systems that are significant to it, access to contacts and information, and so on).

If these assets are foreign in nature or controlled by strategic competitors, the elite begins to realize their interests, turning into a collective traitor to public or class interests in conditions of global competition.

At a minimum, this means that an adequate elite must keep personal funds in the national currency, and not in the currency of its strategic competitors.

In addition, it must realize with merciless clarity and completeness that in modern conditions friendship is possible between peoples, but between countries and societies there is only competition.

2.3 Economic crises in Russia

With the beginning of market reforms in Russia in the 1990s. There is an acute economic crisis, called the “transformational recession”. The content of the transformational recession (crisis) is quite “traditional”: first of all, a drop in production and a deterioration in the living standards of the population. From 1990 to 1996, total production fell by about half, and real investment in fixed assets fell even more.

The main factors are closely related to the nature of the ongoing transformations.

Firstly, the very content of the transition from a resource-limited to a demand-limited system means a radical change in the type of restrictions in the development of production, i.e. and the objectives of each manufacturer. Instead of production for the sake of production, production must come to satisfy needs (demand). The vertical system of connections, based on receiving an order and its execution, is replaced by a horizontal one - relations between independent entrepreneurs. Naturally, such a transition cannot avoid costs, manifested in a drop in production. Secondly, as already noted, structural restructuring naturally leads to the same consequences. Thirdly, state paternalism is being overcome, without which the functioning of a market economy is impossible. Budget restrictions are being tightened, leading to the bankruptcy of a large number of enterprises. Thus, at the end of 1995, every third enterprise in Russia was unprofitable. Fourthly, the weakness (lack) of proper market infrastructure aggravates the difficulties of transformation and additionally affects the decline in production. Finally, a feature of the Russian economy was its low competitiveness: imported products (the share of imports in the consumption of light and food industry products in Russia in 1994 reached 60-70%) further “stimulated” the reduction in production. This also led to a deterioration in the overall structure of production.

In the Russian transition economy, the transformational decline manifested itself especially deeply. For 1991-1995 Russia's GDP fell by almost 50%, industrial production by more than 50%, agricultural production by 30% and capital investment by almost 70%. Subsequently, the decline continued, with some growth noted only in 1999. Closely related to this consequence was a significant decline in the living standards of the population. In 1992, 50 million people (33% of the population) had incomes below the subsistence level; in 1995 their number was 37 million (25% of the population); as a result of the 1998 crisis, their number increased again. The decline in real income led to a deterioration in nutrition: in 1991-1995. per capita consumption of meat, milk and fish products decreased in Russia by 20-30%. The differentiation of monetary incomes has sharply increased - among the extreme 10% groups from 4:1 in 1991 to 13.5:1 in 1995 (in January-October 1996 - 12.7:1).

The world experience of economic transformations has shown that there are two main ways to solve the problems: radical, or shock, and evolutionary, or moderate. Russia chose the first path, China chose the second. The decline in production in Russia has continued for 10 years in a row, the volume of real GDP over these years has decreased by more than 2 times; During the same period in China, production growth in some years exceeded the 10% mark, and over 10 years the volume of real GDP more than tripled.

Economic and social transformations in Russia after 1991 were based on the concept of liberalism, and above all on the concept of monetarism, without taking into account the peculiarities of the development of the national economy, without taking into account its historical experience. The adopted neoliberal model of Russian reform was based on the following macroeconomic postulates:

• liberalization of prices for all goods and services;
• compression of the money supply as the main way to combat inflation, that is, such a monetary and financial policy that sees the solution to all financial and economic problems in limiting the money supply;
• changes in property relations, which the neoliberal model sees as a movement in one direction - denationalization;
• the formation of a market and market infrastructure based on the denationalization of the economy;
• demonopolization of the economy, primarily the elimination of all forms of state monopoly;
• openness of the national market to the world market;
• convertibility of the ruble based on a floating exchange rate system.

When free prices were introduced in Russia in 1992, it was assumed that prices would rise, but only slightly. However, in real life, it was not possible to stop the rise in prices during all the years of reform. The consumer price index rose steadily.

The catastrophic decline in production, the displacement of Russian goods by imported ones, the decline in the standard of living of the people and the increasing differentiation in income levels of different segments of the population - these and many other factors led to the fact that the purely monetarist influence on pricing very quickly exhausted itself: it muffled inflation in 1995 - 1997 gg. but it didn't stop her.

The compression of the money supply led to a reduction in the working capital of enterprises to a minimum, which in turn caused the flourishing of trade on a primitive basis - the natural exchange of goods for goods. It was a convenient means of tax evasion and a form of criminal business. In the 1990s, the money market experienced no less turmoil than the commodity market. The state's monetary and financial policies caused collapses in the money market three times: in 1992, almost all the personal savings of the population were destroyed in an inflationary fire; in 1995, all private financial pyramids collapsed, a significant part of the population was again robbed; August 17, 1998 - a new acute financial crisis that disrupted all forms of macroeconomic equilibrium. Conducted from 1992 to 1998. the policy of the open national market of Russia in front of the world market, the policy of free convertibility of the ruble based on a floating exchange rate led to the displacement of domestic goods from the national market, made the country dependent on loans from international financial organizations, generated astronomical public debt, practically collapsed ruble currency circulation within the country and caused real capital flight abroad. In the economic literature, various amounts of financial assets stolen from Russia appear - 150, 300 and even 800 billion dollars. But everyone recognizes the obvious: the total amount of Russian capital settled abroad is practically equal to the amount of the country’s external debt and has reached a quarter of GDP.

The dramatic picture of capital outflow from Russia is complemented by the process of dollarization of the economy within the country: a financial phenomenon has arisen when the country's population gets rid of ruble cash, buying foreign currency, and above all dollars. The most approximate calculations show that by 1999 the volume of cash supply of dollars inside Russia exceeded (and exceeded significantly - 4-5 times!) the volume of cash supply of rubles in the non-banking system.

The approved federal budget of Russia for 1999 in terms of income amounted to 473.6 billion rubles, based on the projected volume of GDP in the amount of 4000 billion rubles. and an inflation rate of 30%. At the same time, the ruble exchange rate was calculated at 21.5 rubles. per dollar; therefore, in dollar terms, the budget amounted to 22 billion dollars. These are the results of Russia's liberal monetary and financial policies in the 90s.

Particular attention in the process of economic transformations in Russia was paid to privatization - the transfer of part of state-owned enterprises to private ownership.

Total for 1992-1997 changed the form of ownership of 129.5 thousand enterprises (objects). The privatization process was most intensive in 1993, when 42,924 enterprises were privatized, and in 1994, when 21,905 enterprises were privatized. In subsequent years, the pace of privatization decreased: in 1995 - 10,152, in 1996 - 4,997 and in 1997 - 2,743 enterprises.

The results of privatization in Russia did not live up to the hopes placed on it. Decisions on privatization were made not democratically, but directively, that is, not by labor collectives who knew well the specifics of their enterprise, but by the State Property Committee.

The transformation of property relations went in only one direction - the state form turned into a private one. All other forms of ownership were ignored. The Russian model of privatization did not take into account the economic and social efficiency of the privatized enterprises.

The basis for assessing the property of privatized enterprises was the residual value of fixed assets. At the same time, the residual value of fixed assets was estimated on the basis of wholesale prices of the 80s. All this led to the fact that in conditions of inflation, enterprises were sold for next to nothing.

This happens always and everywhere where the principles of optimal combination in the use of all forms of property - private and state, individual and collective, national-national and mixed - are violated. Small and medium-sized enterprises in the service sector, retail trade, etc. require a different form of ownership than giant enterprises in metallurgy, mechanical engineering or railway transport.

An important direction of economic transformation in Russia was the formation of a market and market structure based on denationalization and demonopolization of the economy. In specifically Russian conditions, this led to the state being removed from the most important processes of economic management at the macroeconomic level, and its place was taken by monopoly of the worst kind - the omnipotence of the corporation. State power in these conditions turned out to be weak, and the enrichment of the oligarchy, its every possible strengthening, intensively went through the speculative financial system and criminal operations.

The experience of reform in Russia allows us to draw the following lessons:

1. The experience of economic transformations in Russia has once again confirmed the obvious truth: learning from other nations is useful and necessary, but the national economy must be developed and reformed in its own way. Without taking into account the national, state and social characteristics of Russia, all reforms carried out according to foreign standards are doomed to failure.
2. With the further development of socio-economic transformations in Russia, it should be taken into account that in the 90s the entire state system of economic management was destroyed, including the elimination of state monopoly, and in its place came not competition, but a corporate monopoly, which is waging an endless race to increase prices and at the same time reduces production. Under these conditions, there is a need for an organization of a normal market that does not know the omnipotence and lawlessness of corporate-mafia monopoly. In modern conditions, Russia needs an organization of a market economy that would serve the interests of the state and the people, and not the interests of the oligarchs. Modern Russia needs not a criminally speculative, but a creatively regulated market.
3. In Russia, at the present stage of its development, cost inflation is of exceptional importance. At the cost of depriving vast sections of the population of material well-being (low levels of pensions and wages, their untimely payment, wage growth rates lagging behind inflation rates), the state in certain periods managed to stop the growth of demand inflation, but cost-cost inflation is still thriving. Monopoly prices of corporations for oil, gas, and energy resources are growing at a steady pace. Purely monetarist measures to combat inflation do not have the desired effect of increasing investment demand and production growth. Under these conditions, there is an objective need to establish stricter state control over natural monopolies, and in a number of cases to nationalize these corporations. In a normal socially oriented market economy, nationalization and denationalization (including privatization) are equal economic processes that have the same right to real implementation.
4. In the process of reform, the reproductive structure of the Russian economy turned out to be disrupted: the share of extractive industries is growing, the share of processing industries is falling (they are literally crushed by imported products). High-tech domestic production is dying. The country is turning into a raw materials semi-colony, supplying cheap gas, oil, timber, fish, furs and other raw materials to the world market. Sooner or later, the Russian state will inevitably have to eliminate the purely raw materials aspect of the development of the domestic economy if the country wants to remain among the developed countries of the world.
5. The key problem of economic transformation in modern Russia is the question of how to stop the decline in production without plunging the country into a new round of inflation. Recent world history has not yet seen examples of a decline in production over the course of 10 years. Russia's historical prospects should be to raise the economy from the ruins of reformism in the very near future, to really begin to take care of the country's national security and to positively solve a number of social problems.

Firstly, at this time the crisis of underproduction was not overcome.

In 1999, the gross domestic product amounted to the level of 1990 (equal to 100%) only 59%, the volume of industrial production - 50% and the volume of agricultural production - 57%. All this affected the position of the Russian economy in the system of international coordinates. In terms of the size of the GDP created, our country ranks last among the ten largest countries in the world, as well. In terms of GDP per capita, we are ahead of India and China, but behind such Latin American countries as Mexico and Brazil; In terms of industrial production, Russia is in 5th place in the world (after the USA, Japan, China, Germany), but per capita it is in the second ten.

Secondly, the externally observable course of the underproduction crisis has changed somewhat. On the one hand, as a result of the rapid inflationary rise in prices, the purchasing power of the population sharply decreased and began to lag behind the supply of goods and services. On the other hand, domestic production of consumer goods fell continuously. Consumer demand was largely covered by the import of foreign goods. From 1992 to 1998, commodity resources for retail trade turnover due to own production decreased from 77 to 52% of the total volume of such resources.

Thirdly, if in the West during crises the state sharply increases its influence on supply and demand, then in Russia, especially in 1992-1996, the state withdrew from actively countering the decline in domestic production. The bet was made on a spontaneous market. But this calculation did not justify itself.

The causes of the socio-economic crisis in Russia can be divided into three main groups:

1. Reasons that were inherited by Russia from the former USSR. List of reasons:
   1. almost complete or total nationalization of the economy, and, accordingly, property;
   2. the presence of deep imbalances in the economy (76% of means of production and 24% of means of consumption);
   3. anti-democratic nature in state management of property and the economy, i.e. the absolute predominance of command and administrative levers in management;
   4. concentration of 96% of all property in the hands of all-Union ministries and departments;
   5. alienation of workers from the means of production and the results of labor, from the labor process itself, which was manifested, first of all, in the absence of effective incentives to work, to the dominance of “equalization”;
   6. excessive centralization in the redistribution of national income through the state budget;
   7. the policy of rural robbery flourished, which was expressed in pumping a significant part of the national income created here in favor of industry, primarily through the price mechanism;
   8. huge physical (about 60%) and obsolescence (about 90%) of fixed assets, low labor productivity.
2. Those reasons that were caused by the actions of the “reformers” in the 90s.
   1. severance of economic ties with the countries of the former USSR;
   2. lack of a scientifically based strategy for transforming the administrative-command system into a more developed and advanced economic system;
   3. abolition of public administration and active introduction of market levers that were used in developed countries of the world almost a century ago;
   4. the dominance of the ideology of a free market economy in legislative bodies;
   5. the policy of shock price liberalization and the elimination of labor savings;
   6. lack of a comprehensive military-technical policy of the state;
   7. the adoption of numerous laws, regulations, and government orders, which, as a result of the overwhelming tax pressure, put the manufacturer at a disadvantage and the intermediary in a privileged position;
   8. lack of a reliable financial and banking system and state control over the activities of commercial banks;
   9. thoughtless implementation of the programs of Western experts into practice, including various international economic organizations, for example, the World Bank;
   10. mafia-nomenklatura nature of denationalization and privatization;
   11. massive capital flight abroad;
   12. lack of the necessary investment climate;
   13. excessive expansion of the administrative apparatus;
   14. excessive tax pressure.
3. These reasons are related to the essence of the transformation of the existing economic system in the country, the specifics of the transition period being experienced, which, as evidenced by the experience of other countries, develops in the form of various deep-seated crises and shocks.

The decline in production in the USSR (Russia) began already in 1991. However, there was no economic crisis in the precise scientific sense at that time. The fact is that then phenomena occurred that were diametrically opposed to the crisis: demand far exceeded supply, and the shortage of goods intensified. The recession in that period arose not because production exceeded demand, but because of the severance of economic ties caused by the collapse of the CMEA and then by the destruction of the USSR.

The crisis in the full sense of the word began in 1992, when difficulties appeared with the sale of products and non-payments. Already in the spring of 1992, the amount of non-payments turned out to be so significant that there was a threat of a complete shutdown of production. The government was forced to agree to offsets based on centralized loans. From 1992 to the present, the state of the Russian economy meets all the criteria of an economic crisis: difficulties with the sale of products are increasing, non-payments are growing (at the end of 1997 they exceeded 700 trillion rubles), the profitability of products is decreasing, the number of unprofitable enterprises is growing, the level of unemployment, etc.

The crisis in Russia has significant differences from ordinary crises characteristic of a capitalist economy:

It began not as a result of economic growth and the excess of growing production over demand that could not keep up with it, but during a period of falling production due to the fact that demand fell sharply, became less than supply and then decreased faster than the fall in production.

It arose not in a capitalist economy, but in a transitional one to a capitalist one.

In terms of its scale, the Russian crisis has surpassed all economic crises in capitalist countries that have occurred in history.

There is no mass renewal of fixed capital in the Russian economy. On the contrary, there is a constant reduction in production investments, which have already decreased by more than 6 times. This suggests that the necessary prerequisites for the country’s recovery from the crisis are not being created, that we should not count on an economic recovery in the near future, and that the recovery from the economic recession, if current trends continue, will be very protracted.

The main reason that caused the economic crisis is the market reform carried out - not only chronologically, not only in form, but also in essence. After all, the essence of the reform was the transition to a capitalist society in a short time. Consequently, in a matter of years it was necessary to create a bourgeois class, which was to become the new master of production. (What has been happening in Western countries for centuries). This implied a radical redistribution of national wealth and national income in favor of the bourgeoisie, at the expense of the entire people. Its result was a sharp reduction in the purchasing power of workers' savings and incomes and unprecedented enrichment (due to privatization, rising prices, shadow activities, etc.) of the class of new capitalists.

The income of workers forms effective demand for goods of mass everyday demand. As a result of the reform, it fell sharply and continues to fall, since the share of workers in the total income of the population is constantly declining. (So, if in 1992 the share of wages in the total income of the population was 70%, and business income and income from property - 16%; then in 1996 these values ​​were 34% and 52%, respectively)

The decline in the purchasing power of workers leads to a narrowing of the capacity of the domestic market and causes “overproduction.” This is the essence of the economic crisis Russia is experiencing.

A factor deepening the crisis is the high level of monopoly in the Russian economy and the lack of effective government price regulation. This gives rise to chronic inflation, which leads to the depreciation of production assets of enterprises and causes a reduction in production. As a result of price liberalization, they increased more than 26 times in 1992. Then the inflation rate decreased. Nevertheless, in 1992-94, hyperinflation took place in Russia (prices increased by more than 2 times per year), destroying domestic production. In 1995-96, hyperinflation was replaced by galloping inflation: in 1995, prices increased by more than 1.5 times; in 1996 - by 23%. In 1997, prices rose by about 12%, which, although lower than in the previous period, indicates a high level of inflation that persists despite all the government's efforts to overcome it.

It should be noted that since 1997, the main form of decline in real incomes of workers has been not a general increase in prices, but a decrease in government funding for education, health care, housing and communal services, transport and communications, which has led to their significant rise in price for the entire population. Since in 1997 cash income in the form of wages and pensions increased slightly, their real value, due to the rise in prices of the listed services, decreased for the majority of workers.

Chronic inflation complicates the development of production and can cause its curtailment. It gives rise to a constant depreciation of working capital of enterprises and, as a consequence, a reduction in the latter’s demand for means and objects of labor, increasing their dependence on credit and financial institutions, primarily on banks.

The activities of financial and credit institutions, which as a result of market reform have become private and commercial, are aimed primarily at increasing their private profits. The financial and credit system has become a giant pump, pumping money out of the production sphere into speculative and financial activities. Its income is growing much faster than production income. If in 1992 the added value obtained in the non-productive sector amounted to 84% of the added value in the production sector; then in 1996 it was already 41% more than it.

As a result of the market reform, the function of productive capital investment was transferred by the previous owner (the state) to the new one - the bourgeois class. Government investment has fallen sharply. However, private investment in the Russian economy has also declined sharply.

Of course, some funds are also being invested in the domestic economy. These are primarily industries whose products are in growing demand. This includes, first of all, those that satisfy the growing demands and whims of the bourgeoisie itself, as well as export-oriented industries. There is a change in the structure of the domestic economy, which, however, does not mean its rise, since the general decline overlaps with the increase in production volumes in individual industries.

The reform of the organization of foreign economic relations was also a factor in the deepening of the economic crisis. Let us note that the reorganization of foreign economic relations led to a massive decline in production in a number of key sectors of domestic production (agriculture, light industry, mechanical engineering), the loss of the country’s food independence, its transformation into a fuel and raw materials appendage of developed countries, an economically dependent state.

The tough financial and credit policy of the Russian government, which artificially compresses market demand, is also contributing to the deepening of the economic crisis. A characteristic feature of the government’s policy is its inability to counteract the growth of the shadow economy, the share of which is currently estimated at 40-50% and which is also one of the main factors in deepening the crisis of the legal economy and the collapse of the country’s financial system.

To overcome the crisis, it is necessary, first of all, to radically change the economic policy of the state so that it provides all the necessary conditions for the start of a massive renewal of the technical base of production. Enough specific and varied proposals for implementing such changes have been developed. Despite their serious differences, they have in common that they are aimed at strengthening the centralized principle in the economy, increasing the economic role of the state, and facilitating the development of domestic production. However, the current Russian leadership refuses to change its economic course, since it has made commitments to international financial organizations to strictly implement it (in exchange for receiving loans). It actually acts under the dictation of foreign capital.

If Russia remains in the system of the world capitalist economy, that is, in the sphere of domination of the international financial oligarchy, there is no other way for the Russian economy other than the loss of its economic independence and its transformation into a fuel and raw materials appendage of developed capitalist states. Along this path, unemployment will continue to rise and workers will become impoverished. The Russian economy will acquire an increasingly unfavorable, one-sided structure. The bulk of the manufacturing industry, agricultural sector, transport, and energy will continue to collapse. Growth is possible only in the extractive and raw materials industries, and even then under the subordination of foreign capital, which will take these industries into its own hands on the cheap.

The rate of overall decline in production may decrease, but there are no prerequisites for economic recovery, and they are unlikely to be created, given the constant reduction in industrial capital investment. The economy will somehow be kept afloat only due to extremely cheap labor, that is, the degradation of a significant part of the working people - the main productive force of the country.

The goal of the medium-term program that existed after August 1998 was to stop the crisis, eliminate its causes, and resume economic growth. To do this, first of all, it was necessary to overcome the budget crisis, streamline tax collection, and reduce government spending. In the latter direction, we are talking about reducing not only actual financing, but also state obligations, the preservation of which leads to an increase in budget debts. Reforms in the social sphere were also necessary. These include: military, housing and communal services, pensions, reforms in the social protection system (transition to needs-based benefits), education and healthcare. The country also needed a restructuring of the system of inter-budgetary relations and an uncompromising fight against crime, transferring most of the shadow economy into a legal channel.

Positive results include the fact that some measures of Russian economic reform were nevertheless carried out.

1. Privatization. By the end of 1994, about 70% of all enterprises had been privatized and were in private hands. About 2/3 of former state-owned enterprises were privatized; 90% of small companies are privately owned; 80% of enterprises in the service sector are also private.

This gave foreign investors the opportunity to buy Russian enterprises, and enterprises the opportunity to obtain the necessary capital.

However, land reform is moving more slowly. Farmers fear the uncertainty and potential problems that could accompany land privatization and the emergence of free markets.

1. Price reform. With some exceptions, Russia abandoned government fixed prices. In January 1992, the government ceased to control about 90% of all prices. The international value of the ruble has fallen to the current high black market prices and has become determined by supply and demand.
2. Low unemployment rate. Despite the enormous structural changes associated with the transition to a market economy, mass unemployment has not yet occurred. In the spring of 1994, unemployment was just below 6%, which by international standards is almost full employment.

The downside to the reforms is that many Russian workers have been forced to accept significant pay cuts in order to keep their jobs. As a result, living standards plummeted while income inequality began to rise.

Russia has faced significant challenges during its economic transition.

1. Inflation. Inflation in Russia was enormous. There are several sources of such inflation.

First, in January 1992 prices were “released” and, as expected, prices for many goods instantly increased 3-4 times.

Second, Russian households have built up huge reserves of cash and savings bank deposits while waiting for years for scarce consumer goods to become abundant. After price liberalization, excess money supply poured into the market and contributed to increased inflation and the fall of the ruble.

The third and most important source of inflation was large government deficits financed by an increase in the money supply. Deficiency, in turn, has many roots. First, the privatization of state-owned enterprises resulted in the government losing an important source of revenue—enterprise profits. Secondly, the uncertainty characteristic of transition times led to massive tax evasion. Many local authorities did not pay taxes to the central government.

Many privatized enterprises did not pay the new 28% value added tax. The government's anti-alcohol campaign has also led to a loss of revenue from alcohol sales. Third, the government provided large subsidies to industry and agriculture and increased social benefits to alleviate transition problems.

One of the notable side effects of inflation in Russia was the sharp decline in the international value of the ruble. Such sudden changes in the international value of the ruble have obviously damaged Russia's international trade.

1. Reduction in production volumes and decline in living standards. Real output began to decline already in the 1980s, but its decline accelerated during the reform process. In the table column 2 reflects the process of decline in production volume in 1991-1994. Note that the maximum decrease in real GDP was observed in 1992 and amounted to 19%, and in 1994 - 12%.

The reasons for such a sharp decline in production volumes are: 1) high inflation, which led to unfavorable conditions for obtaining loans and investing; 2) in the destruction of Russia’s international trade relations with the countries of the former communist bloc of Eastern Europe; 3) the bankruptcy and closure of many former state-owned enterprises that could not survive in the new market conditions; 4) in changing the structure of resource allocation and reducing the role of the army.

We know that products are income. A decline in real output means a decline in living standards in Russia. Farmworkers, government employees and retirees have had it tough, and as we've noted, many workers have had to accept steep pay cuts in order to keep their jobs.

1. Inequality and social costs. During the transition period, economic inequality increased. As noted, many farm workers, retirees, and government employees are greatly impoverished. A small, enriched elite has also emerged - some associated with private enterprise, others with corruption, illegal activities and speculation. Significant tensions between “winners” and “losers” fuel public doubts about the desirability of a market economy.

There is no economic security, health care and education have deteriorated; the number of schools has actually decreased; Life expectancy has sharply decreased. In 1988, the life expectancy of men in Russia was 65 years. In 1994, it was 59 years old—13 years younger than American men.

Russia is still in a state of acute economic crisis. The stock market is close to collapse, the possibility and necessity of devaluing the national currency remains a pressing issue in the economic debate. However, the crisis may have an unexpectedly beneficial effect on Russian economic reality, since he exposed all the problems our farm.

Guided by dry theoretical schemes for reorganizing the national economy, Russia has created a structure that is not ready for rapid development. Even in the most prosperous years, when both inflation and all kinds of money market rates were quite low, we were unable to achieve anything other than a one percent increase in gross national income. And you can’t count on more. The country's economy is torn into unrelated parts - industry, financial sector, budget. Everyone is aware only of their own interests, no one trusts anyone. Slowly overcoming this fragmentation while observing all the norms of purely monetarist management would be permissible if we had in stock years of a prosperous world market situation and absolute loyalty to us from foreign competitors. But we don’t have such a reserve, which means it’s time to start improving the economic system “manually.”

The crisis forces compromises. The government has already floated the idea of ​​regulating the market several times. And this does not cause the former rejection. More and more often we hear remarks from industrialists about the need to link individual business strategies with the national one. The financiers remain silent, but at least they do not oppose it. Psychologically, the economy is more ready for unification than ever before.

No reasonable, albeit completely liberal, government has refused to manage the economy “manually.” When the Boeing company was going through a crisis, the American government, in order not to lose the team, first organized private firms for its employees, and then bought them out in order to return the team to Boeing. During the crisis of the 50s, the Germans provided their metallurgy with orders. The Japanese Ministry of Finance stopped the stock market crisis in 1987 with a couple of phone calls.

What the Russian business community is slowly moving towards today is called structural policy. This is more likely not a plan, but a scheme for the development of the economy. The state, focusing on today's and tomorrow's market conditions, determines which sectors are the most important for it today. It proceeds from a number of prerequisites: what kind of income this or that sector of the economy can generate today, where our long-term competitive advantages are located, which enterprises are ready for growth.

But you cannot organize a good structural policy on the sheer enthusiasm of the authorities. There needs to be a counter-desire from business to find exactly those areas where the country can really “take off.” An acute economic crisis is the best moment for this desire to manifest itself.

What is the way out of this situation? If we ignore the details, domestic economists on this issue can be divided into two large camps: radical liberals And gradualists.

Radical liberals(supporters of the “shock therapy” course) advocate rapid and decisive systemic, institutional transformations of both the economy and the entire society, and the breakdown of many state structures of the command and distribution system. At the same time, the radicals rely on the monetarist concept, highlight the liberation of prices, demand strict regulation of the money supply, government loans and subsidies, and the elimination of the budget deficit. For radicals, financial stability is primary in relation to anti-crisis policy.

Promoters of the “shock” model put forward two considerations as its advantages. Firstly, rapidity in carrying out reforms (hardly anyone would agree to a “multi-year” shock). Therefore, the duration of the “shock,” as promised to the Russian population at the beginning of 1992, was limited to one half a year. Secondly, the radicals promised at the start of the reform that total fee(losses) from “shock therapy” should be significantly less than it would be if the evolutionary model of economic reform was implemented. It is not without reason that in the late 80s, supporters of the “shock” model often liked to resort to journalistic techniques, asking the question - what is better: cutting off the cat’s tail in parts or at once?

Liberals believe that the reasons for the protracted depression in Russia are caused by insufficiently radical reforms. Thus, according to A. Illarionov, economic growth in the country is associated with the so-called index of economic freedom. The components of this index are as follows:

• increasing the growth rate of the money supply above the growth rate of real GDP;
• inflation rates;
• production volumes at state-owned enterprises as a percentage of GDP;
• share of government consumption as a percentage of GDP;
• the level of taxation of imports and exports to foreign trade turnover.

The values ​​of the index components are determined as inverse ratios of the values ​​of the corresponding indicators for each country. Then 100% is an indicator of an absolutely liberal policy, and 0% is an absolutely anti-liberal one. According to A. Illarionov’s calculations, Guatemala, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Paraguay, the USA, Japan, Singapore, and Switzerland currently have a level of 83-86%. Less than 50% in Egypt, Zaire, Somalia, Israel, Nicaragua. Russia is in last place - 33-34%, which supposedly explains the protracted depression in our country (according to Illarionov, with a freedom index of 50-60% the country is experiencing zero growth rates, with 80% - 2.4% per year ).

Economists in this area believe that Russia’s most important problem is getting rid of a significant part (from 1/3 to 2/3) of its industrial potential, which is either “not needed at all” or “unviable” in market conditions. In this case, the beginning of stabilization should supposedly be expected when the national economy gets rid of 60% of mechanical engineering, 70 light and chemical industries, 50 coal, 65 woodworking, 36 metallurgy, and GNP decreases to 30-35% of the 1990 level (in 1996 . it slightly exceeded 40%). According to one of the radical liberals, N. Shmelev: “Our society, apparently, has already come to understand the fact that a drop in production is not always and not in all industries an evil, it can also be a good thing. And in this sense, the continuing decline in production volumes in a number of moribund industries will continue to serve as a sign not of decline, but, on the contrary, of “recovery” of our economy.”

Another direction of domestic economic thought, gradualists, adhere to directly opposite positions. They are proponents of a long, gradual and careful transition to a market with the preservation of many old structures (gradual), following the example of China or Vietnam. Gradualists, often drawing on Keynesian concepts, demand serious and sometimes direct government intervention in the economy, public sector support and planning. They view the decline in GNP as a national disaster. In response to the already mentioned parable about the “cat,” gradualists accuse the radicals of declaring that the cat’s tail is much more than half of its body, that instead of the tail, the head is cut off. Gradualists argue that using purely monetarist methods it is indeed possible to bring inflation to 2-3% per month, but if nothing is significantly changed in the current Russian economy, this will turn out to be just another short-term episode. The deep illness of the Russian economy, gradualists believe, lies in its collapse in production and reorientation of raw materials, the loss of the domestic market for many domestic goods, and the decline in the standard of living of the population.

Despite coordinated efforts to achieve a fiscal turnaround and address the pre-crisis inconsistencies between fiscal and ruble exchange rate policies, Russia remains highly vulnerable to economic shocks, especially changes in oil and gas prices and slowdown in economic growth.

Let's look at the macroeconomic lessons of the past:

• As events in the post-crisis period have shown, sustainable macroeconomic growth requires sound macroeconomic management.
• The combination of tight monetary and loose fiscal policy, a fixed exchange rate and excessive government borrowing inevitably leads to a macroeconomic crisis, which is what happened in 1998.
• There is an urgent need to strengthen Russia's public financial institutions, including the tax service, the federal treasury, the budget system, and the public debt management system.

However, the most important lesson is that macroeconomic stabilization cannot be achieved without deep structural, social and institutional reforms.

Now that the government has dealt with the consequences of the August 1998 crisis to some extent, it has moved on to implement a program by one of the leading experts in the field of modern economics, taking into account the lessons of the last crisis.

The Gref Program was developed mainly in the first half of 2000. The fundamental feature of this document is political and ideological consistency - for the first time since the 1992 program.

The basis of economic policy here is the formation of institutional conditions that stimulate entrepreneurial activity as the foundation of sustainable economic growth. Approval of the basic approaches of the Strategic Program of V.V. Putin in April 2000 meant a fundamental choice in favor of the economic and political model proposed by this document.

The full text of the program did not receive official registration at that time, but it became the basis for the preparation of more technological documents - a program of measures for 18 months, for 2002 - 2004. and draft regulations developed by the government.

The focus of the Strategic Program is a set of institutional and structural reforms, including political ones, while maintaining overall macroeconomic stability (primarily adequate budgetary and monetary policies).

The most important components of institutional reforms that must be implemented in Russia in accordance with the “Gref program” are the following.

1. Tax reform and reduction of the tax burden.
2. Reforming the budget system. This is not about a formal reduction in budget expenditures, but about carrying out deep structural reforms of the public sector.
3. Deregulation of economic activity or, what is the same, increasing the efficiency of government regulation. Reducing barriers to entry into the market, simplifying systems for registration, licensing and control over private business activities, simplifying the implementation of investment projects.
4. Providing guarantees of private property, including intellectual property.
5. Reduction and unification of customs tariffs.
6. Development of the financial market and financial institutions. A particular challenge is strengthening the reliability and efficiency of the banking system.
7. Reform of natural monopolies, which involves increasing their investment attractiveness through division into monopoly and competitive sectors.
8. Reforming the social support system to focus resources on helping the poor.
9. Reforming the pension system towards the development of funded principles.

The main feature of the Strategic Program is the absence of sectoral priorities in it, which is the most important characteristic of a document aimed at solving the problems of the post-industrial era. In fact, two circumstances are recognized here. Firstly, the time has not yet come to talk about the comparative advantages of the Russian economy in a sectoral context - only practice will show in which sectors the country can compete on equal terms with the most advanced global manufacturers. Secondly, the most promising and competitive may not be industries, but specific enterprises. The latter is generally typical for countries solving problems of catching-up development.

Finally, the Strategic Program involves solving a number of fundamental tasks that go beyond the scope of socio-economic policy itself. Administrative and judicial reforms are especially relevant here. The achievement of almost all economic goals depends on them, since entrepreneurial activity will be “fettered” in conditions of corruption of the state apparatus and unfairness of court decisions.

Thus, the “Gref program” has already come into effect and will be adjusted as the planned reforms are implemented. We can only hope that this time the next program will still produce positive results and the country will continue to rise after the crisis that has befallen it. In any case, many modern economists share the key provisions of the measures described above to achieve stabilization in the economic situation of our country.

CONCLUSION

As a conclusion to the course work, it should be noted that a structural crisis is overcome when the previous structure of the economy begins to give way to new industries, forms of organization and regulation.

Throughout its history, capitalism has experienced several structural crises, each of which caused a radical restructuring in accordance with the achieved level of productive forces.

An example of modern structural crises is the crises in the 70s. XX century They covered, first of all, a group of industries in the fuel and energy complex (energy crisis) and energy-intensive industries (automotive, steel, etc.). The coal, metallurgical (ferrous metallurgy), shipbuilding, automobile, rubber, textile and some other industries found themselves in the deepest crisis. Structural crises expanded from basic, extractive industries to defense industries. Thus, the fuel and energy crisis of 1973-1975, which was accompanied by a sharp increase in energy prices, primarily affected the energy-intensive automotive industry and forced it to switch to energy-saving technologies. At the same time, production in other energy-intensive industries fell sharply, and fixed capital depreciated significantly. In the USA during the crisis of 1980-1982. In the industry as a whole, about 65 production capacities were used, and in the steel industry - less than 30%. Within the same limits in 1974-1975. In Western countries, the production capacities of ferrous metallurgy were used, which was due to a significant reduction in the demand for metal from a number of industries consuming it, its replacement with plastics and other more resource-saving materials.

Structural crises are accompanied by overaccumulation of fixed capital, a sharp long-term decline in production and corresponding technological and structural unemployment, increased migration of labor, depreciation of its previous qualifications, a violation of the correspondence between the main elements of the productive forces (means and objects of labor, means of production and workers, etc.), as well as between the components of the technological production method. These long-term violations, in turn, lead to structural changes within and between individual forms of ownership, a change in the relationship between market levers of self-regulation of the economy and government regulation, within each type of regulation. If structural crises affect several or many countries at the same time, then it is necessary to use or strengthen supranational regulation in certain areas.

In particular, the energy crisis of the early 70s. forced OPEC oil-producing countries to increase energy prices by 4 times during 1973 alone. This caused a prolonged energy crisis in many developed countries and forced them to strengthen the coordination of their actions. At the same time, each country has developed a set of measures to overcome structural crises. Thus, in Japan in 1978, an emergency social law was adopted for a period of 5 years on the development of 14 industries that were affected by the structural crisis. About 20% of the equipment in these industries was dismantled. The state stimulated the process of structural adjustment through the provision of tax breaks, preferential loans, direct budgetary allocations, protectionist policies, etc. In 1983, Japan adopted a new version of the law for the next 5 years, which provided for a set of measures for the structural restructuring of many sectors of the economy . In Germany, government policy to overcome the structural crisis in the coal industry included measures to stimulate the process of concentration of production, providing bonuses for the closure of mines, paying forced leaves of workers, providing preferential loans, retraining personnel, creating new jobs, etc. The energy crisis in developed countries countries of the world was overcome only in the mid-80s.

Overcoming structural crises is complicated by the deepening economic crisis and the need to increase expenditures of various business entities for environmental purposes. Thus, in ferrous metallurgy, oil refining and some other industries, from 10 to 20% of capital investments go to environmental protection.

Structural restructuring of the economy in developed countries of the world has contributed to the transition to energy-, material- and labor-saving technologies.

In general, structural restructuring meant a transition to automated production. It is based on the widespread use of computers, machine tools with digital program control, industrial robots, flexible production systems, the formation of a new type of worker, the modification of priority goals for the development of society, etc. In the USA, for example, in the first half of the 80s. the sales volume of computers increased 2.3 times, the number of machine tools with CPUs doubled, and the number of industrial robots increased from 22 to 170 thousand.

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Consequences and possible ways to overcome

From what has been discussed above, it follows that the economic cycle is a form of movement and development of a market economy and its basis is the crisis phase. But the crisis itself matures in phases of revival and recovery. During this period, the income of the population increases and the aggregate demand for consumer goods grows, which inevitably leads to an increase in the production sector. The circulation of individual capital flows unhindered, which reduces the severity of competition and leads to a decrease in the rate of introduction of new equipment and technology. The extensive type of reproduction begins to predominate, especially since existing unemployment contributes to this.

But gradually the growth rate of production of goods and services begins to outstrip the growth rate of effective demand and a crisis sets in.

The crisis manifests itself in the overaccumulation of capital: firstly, in the form of unsold products (overproduction of commodity capital), secondly, in the form of an increase in underutilized production capacities (overaccumulation of production capital), and thirdly, in the form of an increase in money not invested in production (overaccumulation of money).

All this is an economic crisis of overproduction with all the attendant consequences.

As practice shows, in addition to cyclical crises, there are structural, agricultural, currency, raw materials, energy, and environmental crises.

Structural and agrarian crises are discussed here.

They are generated by imbalances in the development of individual sectors and spheres of the national economy. And the imbalances themselves can be associated with discoveries in science, achievements of scientific and technical progress, depletion of sources of raw materials, energy resources, natural disasters, etc.

Thus, the development of marine shipbuilding and shipping in the mid-twentieth century began to experience serious difficulties due to the emergence of competing aviation and pipeline transport.

The developing gas and oil production began to compete with coal mining industries. Many types of raw materials (leather, wool, metals) began to be replaced by products of the chemical and petrochemical industries.

In the 70s of the twentieth century. Almost the entire world faced an oil crisis associated with multiple increases in crude oil prices. The rise in prices was not caused by an increase in production costs, but by a cartel agreement between oil exporting countries (OPEC). The sharp rise in oil prices led to the ruin and bankruptcy of many enterprises around the world.

Of course, such crises do not fit into the framework of the theory of cyclicity, going beyond its limits.

As developments in Russia show, a crisis, and a long-term one, can also be due to political reasons.

By the end of the 80s, the USSR economy was experiencing certain difficulties: growth rates decreased, production efficiency fell, and the increase in the living standards of the population slowed down. But this did not yet entail the need for the collapse of the Soviet Union, the artificial fragmentation of enterprises and the destruction of the system of interrelations between industries and enterprises.

This was done to please the ambitions of a certain circle of people, and on the threshold of the new millennium we have what we have.

Agrarian crises

It is known that agricultural relations include the entire set of relations associated with the production, transportation, processing and delivery of finished goods to customers.

Based on this, we have to admit that agrarian crises are: firstly, part of cyclical crises, and secondly, a crisis caused by the characteristics of agricultural production (seasonality, dependence on climatic and soil conditions, the actual impossibility of accelerating development processes, etc. .)

In addition, crises of overproduction here often turn out to be a consequence of previous crop shortages - in order to protect itself, society creates a certain reserve.

As part of cyclical crises, the agricultural sector of the economy experiences the same ups and downs, layoffs and disasters that are inherent in other sectors of the economy.

As for the purely “agrarian” side, there are many peculiarities here.

Agrarian crises: 1) cover only agriculture; 2) do not have a cyclical nature; 3) are long lasting.

The first agrarian crisis of overproduction that engulfed Europe occurred in the last quarter of the 19th century. The main reason was the arrival of cheap grain from America and Australia as a result of the development of shipping. A sharp drop in grain prices (in England - by 48%, in Germany - by 27%) ruined millions of farms, agriculture became unprofitable,

The second agrarian crisis broke out in the 20s and 30s of the twentieth century and swept the whole world. After the end of World War I, European countries began to develop their agriculture and stopped buying grain abroad. And the cyclical crisis that began in 1929 coincided with the agrarian crisis and further aggravated the situation in the countries of the world. The agrarian crisis included not only grain production, but also livestock farming, poultry farming, production of industrial crops, etc.

In the USA alone, in 1926–1937, more than 2 million farms out of 6 million were forcibly sold for non-payment of debts.

The beginning of a new, third agrarian crisis dates back to the period of restoration of farms after World War II and the first steps of scientific and technological progress (NTP).

The crisis was expressed, first of all, in the accumulation of a mass of unsold agricultural goods. By the mid-60s, grain reserves in exporting countries increased eightfold compared to the mid-50s, and doubled in other countries. This situation drove down prices and bankrupted farms.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century (70s - 90s), the governments of many countries took the path of regulating agrarian relations. In order to ensure stability in the markets of agricultural goods, a reduction in acreage is encouraged, quotas for the delivery of products are reduced, and small-scale commodities with their low profitability are supported. Thus, in the early 90s of the twentieth century in the USA, 34% of agricultural farms sold products for no more than 5 thousand dollars per year; their share accounted for only 3.2% of all agricultural products. Moreover, each of these farms turned out to be unprofitable on average by 1 thousand dollars, which was covered by state subsidies.

The current policy of the governments of Western states indicates that they are trying to reduce the damage from crises of overproduction by exporting their surplus goods, including our Russia.

In the fight against crisis phenomena, the role of the state is great. Using available funds, the state can keep the economy from overheating during periods of expansion and promote development during periods of recession.

(The course being studied has a special section on the role of the state in regulating economic processes).

Russian economic crisis

The long-term crisis experienced by the Russian economy in the last decade of the 20th century is diverse in nature. It combines the influence of cyclical fluctuations, structural changes, currency shocks in other countries, fuel and raw materials problems and, of course, political events in the world.

The halving of the Russian Federation's gross domestic product (GDP) in the 1990s indicates not only the catastrophic state of the economy, but also how difficult the task of bringing the country out of the crisis is.

The spirit of the market involves balance and profit. In a planned economy, market principles are not taken into account and the state, as the owner of the means of production, is interested in increasing its potential, which is achieved through capital investments (investments). As a result, the economy had many enterprises and facilities with low efficiency due to insufficient production factors (capital, labor).

The collapse of the USSR and the artificial breakdown of relationships between enterprises, industries and regions led to structural crises, although abroad the tendency is the opposite - to unite.

The “shock therapy” with the opening of borders to foreign goods and lowering prices turned out to be extremely painful. This was not only a robbery of the population, but also the beginning of the “strangulation” of the domestic commodity producer.

Nor was the focus on creating states on national-religious grounds - Slavic, Islamic, Buddhist, etc. - caused by economic necessity.

Our state has to solve the problem - either the country will be independent, diversified, or it will be a supplier of material and raw materials and cheap labor for the developed countries of the world.

STRUCTURAL CRISIS STRUCTURAL CRISIS

STRUCTURAL CRISIS (Greek krisis - decision, turning point, outcome), in economics - a discrepancy between the outdated mechanisms of existing economic policy and the new conditions of economic activity that have changed as a result of economic development.

encyclopedic Dictionary. 2009 .

See what a “STRUCTURAL CRISIS” is in other dictionaries:

Structural crisis Encyclopedia of Law

structural crisis- Violation of the proportions of social production, arising as a result of the aggravation of contradictions between developed and developing countries, as well as due to the growth of environmental problems, includes economic, energy, raw materials, currency... ... Dictionary of Geography

Structural crisis- see Crisis; Economic crisis … Large legal dictionary

Debt crisis- (Debt crisis) A debt crisis is a situation in which public debt grows in relation to tax revenues. Global debt crisis, sovereign debt crisis in a number of European countries, causes of debt crises,... ... Investor Encyclopedia

DEBT CRISIS, solvency crisis- – a situation in which the debtor is unable to repay its external debt according to the schedule agreed with the loan. In modern In such cases, a debt settlement procedure is applied. More often this happens on a multilateral basis, but... ...

ECONOMIC CRISIS- phase of the business cycle, the lowest point of economic development. It is characterized by a sharp decline in market conditions, destabilization of the national economy, and increasing imbalances in social reproduction. E.k. appear with the transition from... ... Financial and credit encyclopedic dictionary

Economic crisis Encyclopedia of Law

Economic crisis- (English economic recession/crisis) 1) crisis of overproduction - relative overproduction of goods that cannot be sold due to the limited effective demand of the population; 2) a structural crisis, an urgent discrepancy between... ... Large legal dictionary

This article describes current events. Information may change quickly as an event unfolds. You are viewing the version of the article dated 14:59 December 13, 2012 (UTC). (...Wikipedia

raw materials crisis- Structural economic crisis, reflecting the disproportions between the growth of consumption of raw materials and the volume of their production in the world economy... Dictionary of Geography

Books

• , Mau Vladimir Alexandrovich. The book is devoted to the study of crises in modern (post-communist) Russian history. Among them are transformational, macroeconomic, structural, revolutionary crises, as well as crises...
• Crises and lessons. The Russian economy in an era of turbulence, Mau V.. The book is devoted to the study of crises in modern (post-communist) Russian history. Among them are transformational, macroeconomic, structural, revolutionary crises, as well as crises...

I hear conversations around me about the structural crisis of the Russian economy every day. True, no one offers a solution to overcome it or minimize its consequences. Here is my view on this issue.

Economy of the country

It is a mistaken opinion that the country's economy is exclusively its man-made agricultural resources. Meanwhile, this is a deeper concept.

The economic activity of the state implies all resources produced by man or provided by nature and located within its borders, which are used to improve the living conditions of the population in this state.

Manifestation of the economic crisis in Russia

The crisis in the Russian economy, in my opinion, is expressed by the following indicators:

• low level of economic development of society;
• vastness of territories;
• climatic conditions unsuitable for life of animals, plants and humans.

At the same time, the second indicator is excluded altogether if the first one is high: it is not a problem to overcome significant distances, having free access to aircraft capable of transporting loads of significant mass at supersonic speed, which are unlikely to appear in the conditions of the Russian raw materials economy.

The third indicator, although not completely, is also neutralized by the first: information leaks to the media that climate conditions can be influenced. At worst, genetic engineering is not asleep, capable of growing agricultural and livestock fruits that are resistant to minimal temperatures.

About overcoming barriers

The recipe for overcoming the structural crisis of human economic activity in Russia is very simple: a speedy transition to a post-industrial economy.

The post-industrial economy means advanced nanotechnology, automation of production, high performance indicators of a person who is not physically busy eight or more hours a day, six days a week, but intellectually, for a short time.

But is this possible in Russia given the vast territories and the amount of natural resources per capita? The question is open...