Russia must comply with international standards, rules of the trade: official
New Delhi: Russia must comply with rules of international trade and international standards, including technical, food, and other ones, Russian Accounts Chamber chairman Alexey Kurdin believes.
“Russia must retain its adherents to the basic institutions of the market; the globalization has not gone anywhere, although many have started talking about island economies, and technological powers. I don’t quite agree with this term.
For an instance, to sell your products, you must comply with technical standards, and safety standards of products, used in these countries. In order to overcome these national borders, the world has long started developing international standards, in order to increase freedom of movement of its products,” Kudrin told reporters on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).
Russia should not develop its own technical standards in order to remain an international player, the official believes.
“I concede that these moods or tensions will lead to us orienting ourselves not to Western technical standards, but, for example, to Chinese technical standards. But, to create our own technical standards, means to lock ourselves out and stop selling our products either to China or other Asian states. This means we must comply with some common standards. The whole world was going towards Western and Eastern – Japanese, for example, standards converging. I do not think that the world has gone in some other direction in this sense. About food. Yes, indeed, domestic markets protect themselves a little; European standards differ a little from other states, but, if we want to export our food to these markets, then we will comply with their standards,” Kudrin opined.
However, on the other side, Russian Accounts Chamber chairman Alexey Kudrin said that the current situation in the world has not changed the basic principles of the Russian economy. It remains a market economy with a private sector.
“I remain in absolutely the same positions as before. The current situation has not changed the basic, fundamental principles of the Russian economy. We remain a market economy, we retain our private sector. Moreover, it was underscored during the Sberbank breakfast that it is the private sector that reacts faster to the current events, adapts faster, and acts as a factor of more rapid recovery, because it makes decisions here and now, instead of complicated bureaucratic procedures of state bodies or a state-owned corporation. Everyone knows that both the Western economy and the new economy are more efficient when they are more flexible and adaptable, which means the private sector,” Kudrin told media on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).
According to the official, Russia must never return to the planned economy.
“There is one more point: after all, a planned economy implies that the state makes a decision for an enterprise, not only in terms of volume of production but on prices as well. It means that we must once again give up or nationalist our property, and then the enterprise loses responsibility for its results. I think, we must never return back to this,” he added.
In early January, Kudrin told the media in an interview the story of Russia’s path from planned to a market economy and expressed his certainty that there will never be a return to the former.
(Vinayak)
