New Measures of Output, Labour and Capital in Industries of the Russian Economy

Abstract

Russia is an important part of the world economy both now and in the past. Indeed, one would expect an abundance of studies on Russian economic development. In the past, growth and performance in planned economies vis-à-vis the Western world did attract much attention. These types of studies contributed to two revolutions of development thinking, which are the “big push” approach based on success of Soviet industrialization in 1930s and the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, recent performance of the Russian economy is less considered while much could be learned from studying the post-Soviet economic development. The key obstacle to the research in case of Russia is data availability. Detailed industrial data of labour, capital and output from early 1990s onwards is not available both in the official statistics and in the literature. The present paper addresses this gap, providing detailed description of the newly developed dataset, which covers 34 industries in NACE 1.0 classification in 1995-2009. The paper also reports results of output growth rates decomposition into contributions of labour, capital and productivity (industrial growth accounting). Using more detailed data and better theoretical foundation it shows that the contribution of capital to economic growth in Russia is much more substantial that it has previously been reported in the literature until recently.

Keywords: economic growth, Industrial growth accounting, the Russian economy, economies in transition

JEL Classification: O47, P27