Экономика России

 
Russia and Europe to push on roaming call charges 
 
Russia and European Commission have agreed to work on a partnership agreement allowing Russia to become a member the European roaming model, after a meeting between the Russian Ministry of communications and members of the European commission in Brussels. 
 
Igor Shchegolev Russian Minister of communications hailed the move saying that the proposed model will improve communications from abroad.  
 
“We have expressed willingness to join the European model and extend it to Russia. This means that Russian citizens will pay for services according to European tariffs”  
 
According to the Ministry of Communication experts from both parties will work out the most feasible scheme of cooperation, with the Minister looking for an expedited outcome. 
 
“ The road map can be presented by April and talks on the project should be finished not earlier than in 2012. The Russian side is ready to accelerate talks.”  
 
Prime Minister Putin stressed the importance of the issue for Russian citizens with Minister for Communications, Igor Shchegolev, prior to Euro commission meeting.  
 
“We have raised these issues in bilateral negotiations with mobile operators and we continue to push them, but the issue should be addressed to the European Union because the European Union has a single roaming rate, there are two special rules of the European Union, which is compulsory for all participating countries” 
 
Viktor Markov Senior Analyst Zerich Capital Management believes this bilateral agreement could see costs fall for many Russian roaming customers.   
“It is a good sign for Russian citizens and a strong regulatory move to support customers and control tariffs of mobile operators. The price of roaming was earlier addressed by the regulatory body following unjustified overstatement of tariffs. The operators were overpricing roaming tariffs according to their own calculations unproved by the general rules. On the other side foreign operators impose high prices on connection service. Currently, the roaming tariff includes Local operator tariff cost plus foreign operator tariff and additional costs for connection service.  If Russian operators will apply the European roaming model the tariff will exclude the connectivity cost and operators will be able to change and influence the tariffs only according to the European charter which states that the cost of out warded calls should not exceed 49 cents per minute and 24 cents per minute for incoming calls.”  
 
According to Top Three Russian mobile operator’s statistic data 20 to 30% of revenues comes from roaming services.  Markov says that the implementation of the new scheme for roaming service will not affect operators’ revenues. 
 
Prices and Consumer Incomes 
 
The other economic factor that consumers must consider carefully in making their purchases of goods and services is their own level of income. Most people earn their income from the work they perform, whether as physicians, carpenters, teachers, plumbers, assembly line workers, or clerks in retail stores. Some people also receive income by renting or selling land and other natural resources they own, as profit from a business or entrepreneurial venture, or from interest paid on their savings accounts or other investments. 
 
We later describe how the prices for those kinds of payments are determined; but the important points here are that: 1) in a market economy, the basic resources used to make the goods and services that satisfy consumer demands are owned by private consumers and households; and 2) the payments, or incomes, that households receive for these productive resources rise and fall — and that fluctuation has a direct influence on the amount consumers are willing to spend for the goods and services they want, and, in turn, on the output levels of the firms which sell those products. 
 
Consider, for example, a worker who has just retired, and as a result earns only about 60 percent of what she did while she was working. She will cut back on her purchases of many goods and services — especially those that were related to her job, such as transportation to and from work, and work clothes — but may increase spending on a few other kinds of products, such as books and recreational goods that require more leisure time to use, perhaps including travel to see new places and old friends. 
 
If, as in many countries today, there are rapidly growing numbers of people reaching retirement age, those changing spending patterns will affect the overall market prices and output levels for these products, and for many others which retirees tend to use more than most people, such as health care services. In response, some businesses will decide to make more products and services geared toward the particular interests and concerns of retirees — as long as it is profitable for firms to produce them. 
 
To summarize: whether consumers are young or old; male or female; rich, poor, or middle class; every dollar, peso, pound, franc, rupee, mark or yen they spend is a signal — a kind of economic vote telling producers what goods and services they want to see produced. 
 
Consumer spending represents the basic source of demand for products sold in the marketplace, which is half of what determines the market prices for goods and services. The other half is based on decisions businesses make about what to produce and how to produce it.

Russian billionaires back in town 
 
The number of Russian billionaires has returned to beyond pre crisis levels according to the annual survey by Finans magazine. 
 
The annual survey undertaken by the magazine shows that Russia currently has 114 billionaires, more than the 101 it had in 2007, but with the net worth of the richest 10 Russians still down at $182 billion, compared with $221 billion in 2007. 
 
Retaining number one position is NLMK Chief, Vladimir Lisin with a net worth according to Finans magazines list of the Richest Russians compiled at the end of 2010, of $28.3 billion. His net worth has been buoyed by the rebound in the Russian stock market since the start of 2010, with seemingly insatiable Chinese demand for steel also helping global steel prices, and his wallet. 
 
Mikhail Prokhorov, owner of the New Jersey Nets, Chairman of Polyus Gold, and president of Onexim came in at second position with a net worth estimated at $22.7 billion, largely through having sold his stake in Norilsk Nickel at the height of the 2007-2008 boom, and purchased a half stake in Renaissance Capital, with the performance of gold also helping his Polyus Gold operations over the last 18 months. 
 
Another beneficiary of the rebound in global demand and prices for metals is Russia’s third richest magnate, Alisher Usmanov, who Finans magazine estimates is worth $19.9 billion.The co owner of Mettaloinvest also has significant media, telecoms and internet interests, and is a major shareholder in London’s Arsenal Football Club. 
 
Metals also underpin the wealth of Oleg Deripaska, General Director and majority shareholder in Rusal, the world’s largest Aluminium producer, with an estimated net wealth of $19 billion. 
 
Roman Abramovich, owner of the Chelsea football Club, and majority shareholder in Millhouse, rounds out the top 5 Russian billionaires with a net wealth estimated at $17.1 billion. A major shareholder in steelmaker and miner, Evraz, he also has gold interests through Highland Gold. 
 
Rounding out the top ten, according to Finans Magazine, were more metals and energy magnates, Alexei Mordashev ($17.05 billion), Suleiman Kerimov ($16.9 billion), Mikhail Fridman ($16 billion), Vladimir Potanin ($14.3 billion) and Vagit Alekperov ($10.9 billion). 
 
Entrepreneurship in Transition Economies

Introduction

The establishment and growth of new enterprises is central to the transition process. This is because the change in economic system from communism to capitalism implies a reallocation of resources in which new firms have to be the main actors. Compared to other situations of major liberalization, existing firms are less well placed to be the engine of structural change because they are themselves institutions of the planning system and must also be subject to major reforms. Thus, while mainstream economists have emphasized the three pillars of the “Washington consensus” - stabilization, liberalization and privatization – analysts such as Kornai  and McMillan and Woodruff have instead argued that the creation of new firms de novo would be the primary mechanism of the transition.

As a period of major economic and institutional change, transition throws up numerous opportunities for “low-level”  entrepreneurs to transfer resources from low to high productivity uses in the new market economy. Moreover, the incentives for innovation and efficiency were notoriously weak under communism so reformers in the transition economies have been also greatly concerned with Schumpeterian entrepreneurship. Overcentralisation and inappropriate management incentives were important causes of the stagnation in the last years of communism and new technologies have to be adopted to restore growth. As with all innovation, the driving force was expected to be “high-level”  entrepreneurship.

However, the transition economies started their reforms with few legal, institutional and policy structures to provide the basis for an entrepreneurial market economy. To the contrary, the institutional environment has created numerous new barriers to entry, some conventional and others unique to transition. These have prevented entrepreneurs from fully exploiting the opportunities opened up by transition. Moreover, the institutional environment is evolving and the process of reform did not always enhance rapid or fundamental change. Indeed, in many countries the chaos associated with transformational reforms instead led to an entrenchment of the former elite in a new quasi–market environment. The development of the entrepreneurial sector is sensitive to the institutional environment with a sharp distinction between the more market-oriented economies of Central and Eastern Europe and slower and more erratic pace of change in the former Soviet Union. Successful entrepreneurship depends not only on initial conditions in the transition economies but also on the speed and consistency with which the reform process has been applied.

Despite the unpropitious environment, we observe a remarkable expansion of the private sector in all transition economies. The average share of private sector output in GDP rose from virtually zero in 1989, at least in centrally planned economies like Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union, to 62% in 2001. The transition economies therefore experienced a similar transformation to China, as Deng Xiaoping’s remark about the first eight years of Chinese reform shows, “all sorts of small enterprises boomed in the countryside, as if a strange army appeared suddenly from nowhere”. Table 1 shows that the increases occurred in every country, and were paralleled by rises in the share of private sector employment. Growth in the private sector share was caused by privatisation of existing firms as well as the emergence of entirely new enterprises. Privatisation has received enormous attention in the literature, but new firm growth was probably at least as important; we observe that a significant proportion of private sector development preceded privatisation in most transition economies.

In this chapter, we examine the opportunities and constraints for entrepreneurship offered by the evolving institutional environment and the characteristics of the people who stepped up to the challenge. In the next section, we place the concept of entrepreneurship in a transition context, before identifying in the third section the unique features of entrepreneurship in transition economies. Section 4 discusses the evolving business environment while the scale and nature of entrepreneurship in transition economies is reported in the fifth. The personal characteristics and the business strategies of entrepreneurs in the transition economies are discussed in the sixth and seventh sections respectively. Section 8 concludes by outlining directions for future work.

Entrepreneurship and Economic Transition

To what extend can definitions of entrepreneurship be transferred from mature market economies to transition economies? Defining entrepreneurship for transition economies is not made easier by the fact that definitions of entrepreneurship vary in the literature, as other chapters in this handbook reveal. In this section, we discuss the distinctive character of entrepreneurship in transition and analyze how this might change as the transition process develops.

 Defining Entrepreneurship in a Transition Context

Existing definitions stress the innovative aspect of an entrepreneur, her decision-making under uncertainty and her role as coordinator of resources. These were developed in work on Western economies but entrepreneurs face a different business environment in the transition context. They have to learn a different coping behavior 2, formed by their experience under communism, and they may have different personal characteristics.

Baumol argues that the definition of the entrepreneur should reflect the local incentive structure. In transition economies, this encompasses the onslaught of rapid changes and the resulting uncertainty, a wide range of opportunities thrown up by the restructuring of formerly planned economies, imbalances between supply and demand, fragile or only partial market institutions and a variety of informal rules and behaviors which are remnants of the communist past. However, while many market institutions were absent, the skill level and educational attainment and in some cases investment into local technology were on par with the developed world.

Thus, the characteristics of entrepreneurs and their economic impact cannot be assumed to be the same as those in Western countries. For example, entrepreneurs in transition economies can be value-subtracting because of the numerous opportunities in rent-seeking. Dallago distinguishes between systemic and economic entrepreneurs, with the former introducing changes into the system of institutions and rules. Building on Wennekers and Thurik, Aidis  defines productive entrepreneurship as entailing “innovative activity under uncertainty resulting in an economically productive business”. Thus, entrepreneurship does not necessarily require the establishment of a new enterprise, but includes leaders that took over state owned enterprises and employ new combinations of resources. This definition includes the formation of new businesses as well as spinoffs from former state firms and management employee buyouts (MEBOs) but excludes managers continuing in their role in old enterprises. We refine this definition by focusing on individuals who:

• Perceive and create new economic opportunities through innovative activity;
• Introduce their ideas in the market in the face of uncertainty and other;

obstacles;

• Undertake efforts that result in a viable business that contributes to national

economic growth and personal livelihood;

Entrepreneurship and Stages in Transition

The transition process can be divided into several stages that gave rise to different kinds of entrepreneurship. In the first stage, early transition, equilibration of supply and demand, manifested in adjustment of relative prices, opens up opportunities for mainly Kirznian type of entrepreneurs. This is a period of extreme uncertainty, as there is no previous market information. Channels of resource allocation face disruption as planning is abandoned, though nomenclature networks may provide some alleviation.

Macroeconomic stabilization, indicated by reduced inflation and a resumption of economic growth, removes extreme uncertainty and increases the incentives for Schumpeterian entrepreneurship. In this second stage, the price mechanism can be used to convey information about supply and demand and macroeconomic stability reduces business risks. This allows investments into longer-term projects and unmasks needs for new projects and technologies.

In the third stage, market institutions become more developed and provide better mechanisms for resource co-ordination, information gathering and contract enforcement. Property rights enforcement relies less on physical threat or reputation and more on courts so resources are increasingly accessed through financial institutions and market exchange. At this stage, Schumpeterian entrepreneurship becomes more feasible.

Thus changes in environment and opportunities over time in the transition economies are likely to lead to differences in entrepreneurial endeavor, strategies and personal characteristics. One can expect the initial stage to attract a larger number of entrepreneurs but also to witness a larger failure rate. The skill set and physical as well as social capital of initial entrepreneurs may differ from those in later years, as will the types and strategies of businesses created by these entrepreneurs. However, one cannot assume an automatic progression from stage to stage, so the forms of entrepreneurship that emerge in the early stages may become enthrenched.

The Functions of Entrepreneurship in Economic Transition

In this section, we identify the unique opportunities for entrepreneurship in transition economies. We thus discuss the heritage from planning and describe the reform process and its effect on entrepreneurship, drawing on the literature in comparative economics.

The Heritage from Planning

The emergence of a market economy from a planned one implies a major reallocation of resources: from industry to services, domestic to global production, intermediate products to final goods. Planned economies were “over-industrialised” – the share on industry in GDP was routinely in the 45-50% range as against less than 30% in developed market economies and output was focused to the manufacture of intermediary products. Moreover, though most communist countries were small, they were not very open, especially to West European neighbours, as planners had concentrated trade within the communist bloc. Thus reforms opened many profitable opportunities in services, final products and international trade. One might expect this reallocation to be spearheaded by existing firms rather than entrepreneurial ones.

However, existing firms were themselves institutions of planning, and therefore part of the problem rather than its solution. It was hoped that the sharper incentives and improved governance would follow privatization, but this was everywhere a major and lengthy project and in the interim, new firms would have to play a disproportionate role.

Former state owned firms were however an important breeding ground for entrepreneurs, as well as a source of fixed assets. Socialist enterprises were highly integrated vertically and these structures were often liquidated when the logic of planning was replaced by market incentives allowing their workers and managers to acquire the assets at low prices. New firms, often very small, therefore spun out of the socialist enterprise and filled niches in consultancy, logistics, and business services.

The new market economy also emerged from grey and black-market activities. Planning led to shortages of consumer goods, which created an environment in which arbitragers, black marketers and criminals thrived. At the same time, the rigidity and inflexibility of the planning system, combined with strong incentives for managers to attain plan targets, created a class of “middlemen”, providing inputs critical to the production process. These individuals were often local party members or associated with local government or the secret police, termed the “nomenclatura”. This process of intermediation through informal networks was another important seed bed for the new entrepreneurial class, especially in the former Soviet Union. However, the distinguishing feature of this group was not their ability to spot new economic opportunities but rather their networking skills among the political and economic elites.

Transition Policies and Entrepreneurship

The transition process itself also influenced the pattern of entrepreneurship. In the early 1990’s, the established order broke down and the resulting macro-economic instability as well as some of the methods of privatisation chosen by policy makers in those crucial early years constrained entrepreneurship. Thus, the general business climate in the early years was recessionary and inflationary. Even in the least affected economies, like Poland or Hungary, GDP fell by up to 20%; in much of the former Soviet Union it halved using official statistics.

There was also inflation everywhere after prices were liberalised and though, in countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia, it was fairly speedily brought under control, in most countries, it remained persistently high for the early years of transition, greatly increasing the risks faced by entrepreneurs. The chaotic business environment that existed while a legal and institutional framework was being developed also gave many opportunities for nomenclatura-based networking, and led to an increase of corruption, a failure to enforce property rights and the rise of mafias. One can discern a clear distinction between the sustained progress in business environment in Central and Eastern.

Europe (CEE) – perhaps as a consequence of the European Union Accession processand the more erratic path followed in the former Soviet Union (FSU) and much of the Balkans.

Privatization policy was also crucial for entrepreneurship. The bulk of new firms in the early years were probably created by the “small privatisation” – the sale of house, flats, shops, garages, restaurants etc. When SOEs were restructured for privatization or liquidated, their assets – plant and machinery but also less expensive and more versatile capital goods such as trucks or office equipment – were sold, often at fire sale prices. This factor was particularly significant in the more advanced transition countries like Poland.

Consumers in a market economy

Consumers in both market and command economies make many of the same kinds of decisions: they buy food, clothing, housing, transportation and entertainment up to the limits of their budgets, and wish they could afford to buy more. But consumers play a much more important role in the overall working of a market economy than they do in a command economy. In fact, market economies are sometimes described as systems of consumer sovereignty, because the day-to-day spending decisions by consumers determine, to a very large extent, what goods and services are produced in the economy. How does that happen?

Buying Oranges

Suppose a family — Robert, Maria and their two children — go shopping to buy food for a family dinner. They may originally be planning to buy a chicken, tomatoes and oranges; but their plans will be strongly influenced by the market prices of those goods.

They may discover, for example, that the price of oranges has increased. There are several things that might cause those higher prices, such as freezing weather in areas where oranges are grown, which destroys a large part of the crop. The effect of the freeze is to leave the same number of consumers trying to buy a smaller number of oranges. At the old, lower, price, therefore, sellers would soon run out of oranges until the next harvest. Instead, by raising the price, all consumers are encouraged to cut back on the number of oranges they buy, and producers are encouraged to grow more oranges as fast as they can.

There is another possibility: suppliers could choose to import a larger number of oranges from other countries. International trade, when it is permitted to operate with relatively few barriers or import taxes (called tariffs), can give consumers wider choice and allow producers to offer more competitive prices for a wide range of products, from oranges to automobiles.

On the other hand, the orange crop might be spared freezing weather, but instead consumers decide to start buying more oranges and fewer apples. In other words, instead of the orange supply shrinking, demand increases. This too will drive up the price of oranges for a time, at least until growers have time to bring more oranges to market.

Whatever the reason for the higher price, Robert and Maria will probably respond in a predictable way once they discover that the price is higher than they anticipated. They may well decide to buy fewer oranges than they had planned, or to buy apples or some other fruit instead. Because many other consumers make the same choices, oranges won't disappear from store shelves entirely. But they will be more expensive, so only the people who are willing and able to pay more for them will continue to buy them. Shortly, as more people start buying apples and other fruits as substitutes for oranges, the prices of those fruits will rise as well.