Industrial Policy and Competition Policy: Problems of Interaction and Lessons for Russia

摘要

In recent years, there has been a growing discussion of the role and place of industrial and competition policies in Russia. According to one opinion, industrial policy is needed to accelerate the pace of economic growth, while antitrust policy performs a destructive role in the contemporary Russian economy, creating additional and unnecessary restrictions. From another point of view, antitrust policy is needed to level the competitive playing field and thus create incentives for investment, while industrial policy, by providing additional advantages for market participants in comparison to their competitors, simultaneously makes them uninterested in increasing their efficiency. These extremes are based on the idea that industrial and competition policy are contradictory and mutually exclusive. This article is devoted to a discussion of the problems of interaction between these two policy frameworks, including the possibility of their simultaneous application in today's Russia.