An Empirical Analysis of the Development of Russian Innovation Economy — Based on the Solow Growth Model

Russia's long-term dependence on the development model of the resource economy can achieve the construction of the "oil curse", and the innovative economy has become an inevitable choice for its economic development. Measures to optimize the environment and mechanisms for innovation. In order to travel the actual situation of Russia's innovative economic development, this article uses the Solow model to formulate time data from 2000 to 2018, constructs an economic development model of Russian economic innovation, and constructs an economic development model of technological innovation. The results show that Russia's technological innovation has a negative growth effect, and there are still upcoming events in the development of Russia's innovation economy.

African Studies Keyword: Oil

Oil is a metonym for terms in books and articles in diverse disciplines in African studies. Some portray oil as a causal agent that thrusts formerly low-income countries into the highly competitive neoliberal global economy. Others present it according to the oil curse/blessing binary. As a curse, petroleum causes dysfunctional and costly behavior. But increased revenues from oil just as certainly result in concrete improvements demonstrating a resource blessing. Heilbrunn uses case materials to explore environmental degradation, oil theft, community-company relations, post-conflict reconstruction, local content in contracts, and corruption. These key concepts form a basis for the keyword/concept essay on oil in Africa.

There Will Be Blood: Oil Curse, Fossil Dependency and Petro-Addiction

There is an active academic and policy debate over whether and how oil producers – as exemplars of a larger set of Global South development problems associated with 'resource dependency' – can be associated with a number of 'pathologies' or deficits (corruption, poor economic growth, conflict) that are seen as expressions of a much-wider global addiction to petroleum and natural gas. Equally, there is a vibrant set of regulatory and policy interventions designed to render the oil and gas sector more transparent and accountable through modalities like the extractive industries transparency initiative (EITI). In both cases, the language of dependency and addiction is endemic. The socalled 'resource curse' and oil's commodity status as 'the devil's excrement' are exemplary expressions of oil's apparently seductive yet catastrophic properties. Oil dependency and oil addiction have become central to the discourse – a planetary discourse in effect, of the Anthropocene and forms of life within it. This article explores how discourses of dependency and addiction have been put to work, and with what effect, in the debate around the oil and gas global assemblage. It shows how in the case of dependency (and here it is largely the dependency associated with oil-producing or petro-states such as Saudi Arabia or Nigeria) there are often unacknowledged and deep registrations of the word's meanings which are embedded in liberal governance. Much of this dependency talk, I will argue, locates the problem in a series of failings (which oil both overdetermines and facilitates) associated with liberal views of the self, of political economy and the state. In the case of oil dependency as an addiction, I attempt to draw out how an understanding of addiction as a social (and systemic) issue, rather than a property of individual consumers or the pathological-addictive character of particular commodities, sheds light on how oil is built into hydrocarbon capitalism, and what it will take to, as it were, break the habit of large-scale oil consumption.

Further attempt to explain the oil curse mechanism using a debt overhang concept

PurposeThis study aims at increasing the authors’ understanding how and why the oil curse takes place.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses a structural equation model (SEM) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) in order to underline the mechanism under which the oil curse operates.FindingsThe study shows that oil abundance could lead to inefficient resource allocation. This inefficiency is strongly correlated with a weak institutional setting which would lead to accumulated external debt and ultimately to poor economic performance.Research limitations/implicationsThe quality of institutions and governance plays a major role in defining government success in allocating public resources efficiently. In a weak institutional setting, characterized with lack of accountability oil rents can promote rent-seeking behavior of public agents; a type of behavior that promotes misallocation and waste of resources. This in turn undermines public finances and leads to external debt accumulation. Debt per se is not necessarily a bad thing, but it has a turning point beyond which it can be a source of economy for countries (particularly countries with limited diversified source of revenue and inefficient public sector). It is to note that the authors work does not refute the positive impact that the increase in oil value has on economic growth (e.g. Nusair, 2016). However, it reminds policy makers that in order to sustain this impact over long term, it is necessary to build a strong institutional framework that prevents inefficient use of resource allocation as it could result in rapid accumulation of debt over short period of time. The adoption of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) by a number of oil rich countries has helped them to manage adverse oil shocks. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of these funds could be limited in a country whose institutions are not very strong. Characterized by a mediocre institutional setting, Algeria's sovereign fund, for example, has lost 67% of its reserves over just two years (2014–2015) before reaching the level zero by February 2017 following the drop of oil prices in 2015 (see Central Bank of Algeria, 2017). Also, the foreign exchange reserves of the country experienced a drop of more than 72% over a short period of time (2014–2020), leading to the resurgence of the idea of contracting external debt. Similarly, following the sharp drop in oil prices in 2015, the Saudi Arabia's external debt (% of GDP) has jumped by more than 150% over three years only, reaching a level of 28.85% in 2020 compared to a 10.62% in 2015 (https://Fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SAUDGDPGDPPT). The positive correlation of weak institutions with inefficiency can lead to fiscal policy procyclicality. Inefficient public spending tends to be procyclical compared to productive public spending (Makin, 2014). This procyclicality is apparent in developing countries, particularly those characterized by corrupted and weak institutional environment (Alesina et al., 2008; Frankel et al., 2013). This is conducive to output fluctuations where booms and busts are exacerbated (Frankel et al., 2013).Originality/valueOriginality of the study resides in the idea that external debt is an important element that could help to explain why oil curse could take place. The transmission mechanism that underpins the oil curse hypothesis is yet to be fully understood. In doing so, the paper, with the use of two sophisticated statistical techniques, reconciles between the concept of debt overhang and oil curse hypothesis. Similar research efforts are scant.