Russian Experience

1. Think and say:

a) Are economists in great demand in Russia today? Why?

b) Would you like to be a trained specialist in banking, finance, general economics, risk calculation, currency dealings, social welfare economics, marketing, real sector consulting, accounting? Explain your choice.

c) What do you think about the government in Russia? Are there many people able to pull the country out of the crisis? Do they have the expertise to conduct the reforms with minimal losses?

2. Give a short summary of the text. Find the key sentences. Mention the key ideas.

3. Say what it is “to be a creative economist”.

In Search of Intellect and Wealth

For a long time two schools of economic thought dominated the world scene: the Soviet-style and the free-market school, both of which were as dissimilar as physics and ballet. Of course there were some leading Soviet economists, but their knowledge is not relevant in today’s Russia.

With the free-market economy now prevailing in Russia and the kind of specialization required today, the Russian educational system is in acute need of trained lecturers in banking and finance rather than in general economics. For example, there is a demand for economic analysts specializing in risk calculation, and the whole country has just a few lecturers in currency dealings. Most educational establishments will soon run into difficulties for lack of such specialists.

The government administration needs both macro — and micro-economists, but macro-economists are particularly needed at the Finance and Economics Ministries, the Central Bank and the State Statistics Committee. There is a demand for 50 to 100 such specialists a year.

Around 2,000 specialists in different markets are also needed every year, and an equal number of social welfare economists are in demand. And there is a great need for lawyers with a knowledge of economics — today lawyers and economists fail to understand each other.

Over the next two years the real sector will have no particular demand for general economists, except for marketing specialists. Meanwhile independent consulting firms will continue to emerge, and the real-sector economists will be working there in anticipation of an industrial upsurge. When it comes, they will move to industrial plants, provided that they are offered competitive salaries.

So although several thousand specialists are needed every year, solvent demand remains low, amounting to several dozen vacancies. However, we have to start training such specialists for the long term. Training courses must be opened in the provinces, too, although this is both difficult and unprofitable for lecturers, who will get far better salaries in the capital. But Moscow alone cannot provide specialists for the whole country.

Some believe that the government’s economic team is incapable of pulling the country out of this crisis. The government did make quite a few mistakes and lacks the expertise to conduct the reforms with minimal losses, for example at the macroeconomic level. But there are no specialists with such expertise for the simple reason that macroeconomics of transitional economies is non-existent as a subject of study.

For all the distortions in the economy, there is no alternative to the government’s present economic team. For example, the Ministry of Economics has the strongest group of deputy ministers. But on the level of department heads little has changed since the days of the USSR’s State Planning Committee. Half of the medium-level managers have no idea what the aims of the economic reforms are, although they are qualified specialists in their fields. In other words, they have to be trained to be “creative” economists. But their training can take place only three or four years from now, when a new generation of economists arrive.

So the point today is not to ascertain who is better — Vasilyev or Petrov, Glazyev or Yasin. Top-level economists are few, and if they start staging political duels there is no telling which way the economy will go.

Key terms.