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 suggested that at last progressive measures like anti-trust legislation will transform Russia’s economy just as they did to the North American after 1900. But if that’s to occur, Russia’s Fed Anti-Monopoly Service ( FAS ) isn’t going to play that role unless it is basically transformed, one Moscow researcher asserts, because up to this point it targeted on costs instead of competition in the same way the Soviet State Board 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 consequential case which may be recollected even a century from now as a key move in the problem 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 example the history of control over costs and not about competition or the productiveness of the economy, a reflection that post-Soviet Russia has made small change from Soviet practice in this area.
As the economic guru points out, the up to date Russian anti-trust model was created 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 lack 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 companies 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 restricted to issues of monopoly power, much more so as there was a view that monopolies represented a non-monetary factor of inflation instead of a wider range of issues. That perspective continues to tell Russian officers working in this area, plenty of whom continue to follow over the top profits and monopoly prices instead of the commercial organisations that permit these things to happen, something completely different to the anti-trust approach of the European Union and the US.
But over the past twenty years, Novikov continues, the situation has basically changed.
Anti-trust regulation doesn’t have a phenomenal standing and just like all other sorts of regulation is regarded by many mavens as a potential executive barrier and obstruction for competition. at this moment, he continues, at the centre of the commercial order of the day both for the state and for the opposition isn’t so much the issue of the founding of a personal sector and the formation of the guidelines of business activity as is the augmenting of the efficiency of the economy. And that different focus needs an alternative approach. Indeed, Novikov claims, if somebody today in these new circumstances were to think up an anti-monopoly law ‘from square one,’ [the measure he would propose] would have small in common with the current one, something that few in the governing body or the opposition seem to recognize.