Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 26 – Vladimir Putin’s
suggestion that Russia can progress most efficiently by waiting until the West
develops something new and then buying or stealing it and applying it in Russia
to promote economic growth will not threaten the West or save the Russian
economy, Vladislav Inozemtsev says.
It will not threaten the West because
those like Russia who buy or steal the most advanced Western technologies not
only lack the industrial know how to apply them effectively but do not have the
rapidly developing industrial base that could produce sustained economic growth,
the economist continues (theins.ru/opinions/189596).
The Kremlin leader, he suggests, has
in fact proposed “nothing new.” Many countries now and in the past, including
Russia, have taken advantage of developments elsewhere in this way to help
themselves. Indeed, today, the world is
divided between “developed and successful countries” which innovate and “lagging
and less well-off ones who steal technology.”
But there are several obvious
reasons why Putin’s plan won’t achieve what he says it will. First of all, today
the world is at a phase of development in which industrial espionage can
provide fewer benefits than it did.” It is possible to copy things from the
past as China does but it is not possible to introduce cutting edge technologies.
But there is another and “more
important” reason Putin’s strategy will fall short. “When one speaks about the
most serious kinds of production, it turns out that even copying requires
enormous spending and a powerful industrial base.” China can and does provide
that and therefore benefits, but Russia can’t and doesn’t and therefore won’t.
Russia for example
acquired completely legally Western technologies for the SSJ-100 but couldn’t
make it in a competitive way. It purchased and wanted to install Siemens
turbines in Crimea “not because we did not know the technology of the production
of turbines but because we have lost the competence of producing their main
components.”
“Russia lags behind the West in
productive potential 20 to 30 years,” Inozemtsev continues, “and therefore its
industrial espionage to a large extent doesn’t represent a threat to the developed
world. We probably are still able to
steal something new … but we will not be able to produce it on our own in industrial
scale.”
Economic success today is not about
technology pure and simple but “in the creation of network structures” which
can take those technologies and produce a final product at competitive prices.
That requires a serious industrial base with major investments, neither of
which Russia now has.
In this regard, Russia is not only
not a competitive to the West but even is seeking to limit the development of the
kind of networks the success of the West depends on. “If Russia were a rapidly developing
industrial power,” Putin’s plans “would generate concern in the West.”
“But in the present situation, the production
of final and quality product on the basis of stolen technologies simply elicits
big doubts and therefore isn’t taken seriously” in the West, he says. Those who should be concerned are the
Russians themselves because they are going to remain the big losers from Putin’s
strategy.
What we are seeing in it, Inozemtsev
says, is “the latest act of the struggle between ‘domestic producers’ and
domestic consumers. It will be the latter who will get medicines that don’t cure,
plans that don’t fly, and equipment which threatens the lives of miners rather
than ensures more production.”
Putin’s ideas about “legalized theft”
will likely “provoke the departure from Russia of the majority of companies which
encounter it and a ban on the supply of their production even through
intermediaries.” But both that and the other consequences of Putin’s plan are
even more serious.
They show that the Kremlin “doesn’t
understand the essence of contemporary know-how and the real state of Russian
industry” and that its minions are “completely inadequate to take key decisions
for the country,” Inozemtsev concludes.
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