Financial Journal

p. 9-20

Authors: Ilya V. Prilepskiy

Decrease of dependency level between oil prices and ruble exchange rate is among the key goals of a new version of Russia’s fiscal rule. This study analyzes motivation to adopt this goal by reviewing the estimates for impact of exchange rate volatility on economic growth. It proceeds to assessment of commodity-exporting countries experience and considers the effects of fiscal rule implementation on real and nominal exchange rate volatility. Moreover, the author conducts the long-term scenario analysis of ruble exchange rate volatility for different versions of the fiscal rule. The main results are as follows. First, reduction of the exchange rate volatility leads to a modest increase in investment and export growth. Second, in general, adoption of fiscal rules does not result in reduction of the exchange rate fluctuations, though in the case of Russia since 2017 ruble exchange rate has been significantly de-linked from oil prices. Finally, according to scenario analysis compared with other versions of the fiscal rule (2013 Russian version; Norwegian version; targeting non-oil deficit; tying expenditure growth to GDP growth; no fiscal rule) the current Russian version yields a substantial decrease in exchange rate volatility, though its performance could be further improved by introduction of a mechanism for the base oil price modification in case of a long-term fall in actual oil prices below 40$/barrel in constant 2017 dollars (which is the base price in the current version of the rule).

p. 34-46

Authors: Yury M. Gorlin, Victor Y. Lyashok

Nowadays tax incentives are widely used in many countries including Russia. Nevertheless, this tax instrument has a number of significant disadvantages. Firstly, they decrease budget revenues, and at the same time the efficiency of tax incentives usually is not estimated and seems to be not positive. Secondly, a lot of tax incentives can be replaced by more comfortable types of direct expenditures. Finally, as a rule, from an equity standpoint tax exemption is not a good, as recipients of tax exemption are usually wealthy people. This paper discusses main theoretical aspects of tax incentives (with focus on personal income taxation), provides a review of the world taxation practices and analyzes the tax exemptions in Russia. The results of analyses allow to outline the recommendations intended to improve the personal income taxation.

p. 59-70

Authors: Alexander D. Andryakov

This study discusses only one aspect of the public-private partnership (PPP), namely contingent government liabilities of PPP projects. PPP is long and widely used mechanism for infrastructure development in the world. An extensive international experience and recommendations for accounting, reporting, budgeting and managing contingent government liabilities of PPP projects are available to experts and professionals. Russia has relatively recently begun to use PPP mechanism and issues of PPP contingent government liabilities have not been widely discussed in the literature. The author presents a comparison of international experience and Russian practice in dealing with PPP contingent government liabilities, which shows that all these liabilities except state guaranties on private party debt are excluded from budgetary process and management in Russia. It is only partly due to the budget accounting on cash basis adopted in Russia, because international experience presents a variety of mechanisms to overcome problems of this particular accounting system.

p. 83-94

Authors: Samvel S. Lazaryan, Nikita E. German

In order to conduct a conscious economic policy, timely assessment of the main economic indicators, viz GDP, is needed. In this paper the authors justify the reason why an inclusion of query search data may help to produce better nowcasts compared to the currently used Russian GDP models, which are built on the data from official statistical services. The authors also check, whether this hypothesis holds true in the real-time forecasting experiment. For this purpose the authors suggest two competing dynamic factor models: the one, which includes data on the query search frequency, and the other one, which excludes it. The models show that the inclusion of query search data does not change the forecast performance of the model built only upon official economic indicators. At the same time, both models have produced more accurate nowcasts of Russian GDP then AR(1) model did. Finally, the authors try to explain the resulting irrelevance of query search data in nowcasting GDP. The article discusses both fundamental reasons and the pitfalls of the methodology used in this paper, which could have led to such result.

p. 109-119

Authors: Kristina V. Shvandar, Vsevolod Y. Cherkasov

The article discusses the problem of penetration of non-cash payment instruments into the retail market. Settlements without cash facilitate transparency of transactions. Limitation of the allowable amount of cash payment for retail purchases, which has examples in the world, can facilitate counteraction to transactions that hide criminal activity and tax evasion. However, the grounds for large cash payments limitation are convincing when non-cash instruments have penetrated deeply into the small transactions market. Payment cards compete with cash in transactional costs, and their competitiveness depends on the size of interchange fee. The authors assume, that restricting the allowable amount of cash payments would be a rational step for Armenia to restrain shadow economic activity, but non-cash payment instruments should penetrate deeper into the retail market at first. Efficient solutions could be facilitated by a study of costs in the payment system.

p. 128-135

Authors: Anton M. Maryasin

This article studies key differences between assets impairment methodology according to IAS 36 — Impairment of Assets and relevant Russian analogue — Impairment of Assets Federal Standard. Financial system of Russian government sector requires reconsideration of some IFRS provisions. As result, not the whole set of procedures under IAS 36 may be adopted for Russian government sector.