Soviet Russia

Vienna, Apr six — many have drawn a parallel between Russia’s wild capitalism in the 1990s and the gilded age of capitalism in the U.

S. a century earlier and advised that at last progressive measures like anti-trust legislation will transform Russia’s economy just as they did to the American after 1900. But if that’s to occur, Russia’s Federal Anti-Monopoly Service ( FAS ) isn’t going to play that role unless it is basically transformed, one Moscow researcher says, because up to this point it targeted on costs instead of competition in the same way the Soviet State Panel on Costs ( Goskomtsen ) did ( newtimes.ru / articles / detail / 17599 / ). In an article titled Anti-Trust Russian-Style, Vadim Novikov, a senior analyst at the Moscow Academy of Economics, calls attention to a statement by FAS head Igor Artemyev that what his agency is doing represents a significant case which will be recollected even a century from now as a key move in the issue of the anti-monopoly policy of Russia.

Sadly , Novikov continues, what everybody will actually remember is that the anti-monopoly policy in Russia ( anti-trust ) is in the 1st instance the history of control of costs and not about competition or the effectiveness of the economy, a reflection that post-Soviet Russia has made tiny change from Soviet practice in this area.

As the economic guru points out, the up to date Russian anti-trust model was constructed under the influence of events of twenty years back. The anti-monopoly law adopted in 1991 was meant to become a counterweight to the all-encompassing presence of the state and to make up for the absence of market customs and rules of business exchange. That goal explains some of the features of Moscow’s approach which are being saved even now. It involves not only major corporations but also organs of power. It protects new entrants into the market, little and medium-sized ventures having inherited from the perestroika the political task of making a class of non-public owners. The Russian anti-trust law also was planned to promote fair and just competition instead of being proscribed to issues of monopoly power, more so seeing as there had been a view that monopolies represented a non-monetary factor of inflation instead of a wider range of problems. That perspective continues to tell Russian officers working in this area, lots of whom continue to follow over the top profits and monopoly costs instead of the business associations that permit these things to happen, something wholly different from the anti-trust approach of the Western european Union and the US.