索契冬奧 史上最貴的冬奧
摘錄自：天下雜誌 經濟學人電子報 2013/2/14
2014-02-06 Web only 作者：經濟學人
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| 圖片來源：flickr.com/photos/kk/ |
索契冬季奧運是俄羅斯在後蘇聯時代最大的建築計畫，同時也是俄羅斯貪汙、缺乏效率、揮霍財富與忽視一般民眾的縮影。自2007年至今，其成本已增加超過3倍，成為史上最昂貴的冬奧；一名奧林匹克委員認為約三分之一的資金遭到竊佔，俄羅斯的反對黨領袖則表示，數字還要更高。
索契亦突顯了俄羅斯那尚未解決的北高加索難題。伏爾加格勒發生兩起自殺炸彈事件後，索契成了由超過10萬名國安和軍事人員駐守的堡壘。高度安全警戒讓人想起了1980年的莫斯科奧運，不過，經濟情況才是索契冬奧與莫斯科奧運最驚人的相似之處。確實，就某方面來說，俄羅斯已經完全不同，但仔細觀之，俄羅斯就和1980年時一樣脆弱。
1980年油價高漲，蘇聯亦享有穩定的經濟成長，但幾年後油價下滑，蘇聯政權也開始崩垮。今日的俄羅斯，石油及天然氣佔75％的出口，1980年時則為67％。俄羅斯不再向美國購買穀物，但俄羅斯人購買物品中，有45％為進口產品。
政府正是俄羅斯現代化的主要障礙之一。2000年代，官僚人數幾近翻倍；專家預估，靠國家過生活的人口約佔35～40％，保持現狀也對這群選民有利。官僚沒有鼓勵競爭的誘因，因為那可能會讓他們失去工作。
部分分析師估計，國有企業掌握了大約半個俄羅斯經濟；它們不必面對競爭、大量吸收資源並推升通膨。國有企業會將合約交給管理者的親戚和朋友所擁有的私人企業，索契冬奧正是絕佳的例證。
總統普丁是個謀略專家，但他似乎沒有明確的策略。他或許希望油價會回升；目前油價穩於每桶100美元上下，但不太可能一直保持此價位。由於美國等地的頁岩天然氣崛起，分析師預估油價在接下來6年將下降15％。
專家表示，最近的焦點團體調查顯示，普丁過去的成就在民眾心中已經成為遙遠的記憶。民調機構亦指出，近5成民眾不希望普丁在2018年任期屆滿後繼續擔任總統。此事的危險之處在於，失去民心之際，普丁可能會變得更具侵略性。（黃維德譯）
©The Economist Newspaper Limited 2014
The Economist
Putin's
Russia
Sochi or bust
By The Economist
From The Economist
Published: February 06, 2014
Feb 1st 2014 | MOSCOW | From the print edition
The conspicuous dazzle of the games masks a country, and a president,
in deepening trouble.
FEBRUARY 7th sees the opening of the winter Olympics in Sochi on the
Black Sea. The message of the games is simple: "Russia is back".
Sochi was planned as a celebration of Russia's resurgence, a symbol of
international recognition and a crowning moment for Vladimir Putin, its
president, who for the present seems to have seen off all his challengers.
Appropriately, the opening ceremony will include the image of the
Russian "troika-bird" from Nikolai Gogol's "Dead Souls".
"Rus," wrote Gogol, "aren't you soaring like a spry troika that
can't be overtaken? The road is smoking under you, the bridges thunder,
everything steps aside and is left behind!…Is this lightning thrown down from
heaven? Other nations and states gaze askance, step off the road and give [you]
right of way."
The quote has long been used to justify Russian exceptionalism and
moral superiority. Gogol describes Russia as a deeply flawed and corrupt
country, but it is precisely its misery and sinfulness that entitles it to
mystical regeneration. His troika carries a swindler, Chichikov, and his
drunken coachman, but it is transformed into the symbol of a God-inspired
country that gloriously surpasses all others.
So, too, with the Sochi Olympics. This grand enterprise, the largest
construction project in Russia's post-Soviet history, is also a microcosm of
Russian corruption, inefficiencies, excesses of wealth and disregard for
ordinary citizens. The Olympics are widely seen as an extravagant caprice of
Russia's rulers, especially its flamboyantly macho president, rather than a
common national effort. The cost of the games has more than quadrupled since
2007, making them, at $50 billion, the most expensive in history. One member of
the International Olympic Committee thinks about a third of that money has been
stolen. Russia's opposition leaders say the figure is much higher.
Sochi also illustrates Russia's continuing troubles in the north
Caucasus. After the twin suicide-bombings in Volgograd, 430 miles (690km)
north, at the end of December, Sochi, a resort town of 400,000 people, has been
turned into a fortress guarded by around 100,000 security and military
personnel. Missiles bristle in the mountains, high-speed boats and submarines
patrol the coast, and drones watch from the sky. Russia's 58th army, last
employed in a war against Georgia in 2008, will secure the southern border.
Instead of opening up the country to tourists, these games are likely to be
remembered as the most closed in history. Russia's security agencies are
issuing special passports to all spectators to filter out not only potential
terrorists, but also political troublemakers.
The tight security is reminiscent of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, when
non-Muscovites were barred from the capital and undesirables shipped out. These
are not the only parallels. Both games are marked by hostility between Russia
and the West. In 1980 several countries, including America and West Germany,
boycotted the games in protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This
time the teams will attend, but their leaders, including President Barack
Obama, will stay away.
The picture has already been overshadowed by violent clashes in
Ukraine, the result of a bitter geopolitical contest between Russia and the EU.
Ukraine is essential to Mr Putin's ambitions of creating Russia's own Eurasian
Union, a diminished version of the Soviet Union that was. The Kremlin may not
be projecting its power with military force, but it is trying to draw Ukraine
into Russia's orbit with money, gas and counter-intelligence, while warning the
West not to meddle. It is hardly the behaviour of an amiable Olympic host.
Soviet ghosts
Perhaps the most striking parallel with the earlier Olympics is the
state of the economy. At one level, to be sure, Russia looks completely
different. The government no longer regulates prices; there is a large private
sector. Russia no longer wastes time and money producing things nobody wants.
The military-industrial complex, which once guzzled national resources, has
shrunk. Middle-class Russians dress, shop, eat and travel much as their peers
do in the West. Consumption is conspicuous. Yet a closer look reveals that the
country is almost as vulnerable as it was in 1980.
That year was the peak of Soviet economic stability. Oil prices were
high, and the Soviet Union was increasing its exports of energy through a new
pipeline to the West. The proceeds from those sales paid for the vast state and
financed the import of grain and clothes. While the West was going through a
crisis, the Soviet Union was enjoying modest economic growth. A few years
later, however, oil prices fell and the regime began to crumble.
In today's Russia, oil and gas account for 75% of all exports, compared
with 67% in 1980. Although Russia no longer buys grain from America, as it did
in the 1980s, 45% of what Russians buy today is imported. Walk around a
department store in central Moscow, and it is hard to find anything that is
produced locally. The state remains the single largest employer, while its
corporations—controlling natural resources, infrastructure, banking and
media—dominate the economy.
As Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes, two American economists, have
argued, the highly inefficient industrial structure of the old Soviet economy,
based on misallocation of both resources and people, remains intact. The oil
rent reinforced and perpetuated it: it has bought political stability and the
loyalty of the population, but has slowed down modernisation. Inevitably, the
result is stagnation.
Money as alcohol
Last year, just as the developed world began to recover from recession,
Russian economic growth slowed to under 1.5%. Russia's Ministry of Economic
Development says the economy is not about to return to high growth, and even Mr
Putin was forced to admit in December that the main reasons for the slowdown
are internal. The era of high growth, which coincided with Mr Putin's first
period of rule, is over.
Two main factors drove growth then, neither of which had much to do
with him. The first was the collapse of the Soviet economy; the second was the
market reforms of the previous decade, which freed private enterprise. As Yegor
Gaidar, the architect of those reforms, pointed out, the growth that began in
1999—the year Mr Putin came to power—was largely the result of recovery, and
was observed across the former Soviet Union. It required little new investment,
and used up spare capacity left over from Soviet times. Then in 2004, as Mr
Putin entered his second presidential term, oil prices began to climb sharply,
cheap money flooded the country and consumption exploded. But instead of
creating institutions and laying a foundation for future growth, the Kremlin used
the oil revenue to consolidate power, suppress competition and reassert
Russia's influence in the world.
Although some of that money was stashed away in a reserve fund, a lot
of it seeped into the real economy through budget spending, which fuelled consumption.
In 2005 the Russian government balanced its budget at an oil price of $20 a
barrel. In 2013 it needed a price of $103 to balance it. As Andrei Kostin, head
of VTB, one of the largest state banks, half-joked recently, "A healthy
budget for me is one that injects large amounts of money—particularly in
December—into the banking system, which then permeates warmly and
pleasantly—like beer after a hangover—through the entire banking system."
Disposable income grew twice as fast as the economy in the 2000s, and
so did consumption. The increase in living standards was partly achieved at the
cost of investment. Although investment in new factories and equipment
increased from 15% of GDP in 2000 to the current 23%, it was well below the
level of even Soviet investment in capital stock, not to mention China's. And
as Natalia Orlova of Alfa Bank notes, half of all new construction in the
pre-recession years was of shopping centres, rather than the factories that
could fill those shops with goods.
The oil price is still high, and there is no shortage of money in the
economy. In fact, it is the excess of money and the lack of institutions that
are the problem. Money has long been the main instrument of the Kremlin's power
and governance, buying the loyalty of both the elites and the general
population. After the crisis in 2009, the government increased public spending
by 40%. This pushed up prices and fuelled imports, but did little for the
economy. The salaries of public-sector workers have improved, but not the
quality of their services. Poor education and health care still top the list of
complaints among Russians, particularly outside the big cities.
Kirill Rogov of the Gaidar Institute, an economics think-tank, says
that by increasing spending in order to fuel consumption-led growth, the
government has pushed the cost of labour from 40% to 50% of the country's
GDP—the same share as in developed countries. Yet productivity remains at less
than half its level in the EU. In the past, Russia made up for its dismal
investment climate and poor institutions with cheap labour, which allowed firms
to make profits and invest. Now its economy is trapped between bad institutions
and expensive labour, which makes private firms uncompetitive.
Russia has hit the same problem as the Soviet Union did: it cannot grow
by expanding the labour force. Demography compounds the difficulty. The labour
force grew until 2008, but a dip in the birth rate in the 1990s means that it
is now shrinking. To grow further Russia needs investment, the reallocation of
resources and better institutions, especially property rights. Yet all this
would inevitably threaten the central motivation of Mr Putin and his circle: to
preserve a paternalistic model where the state—and those who identify themselves
with it—are the only source of money and power.
Friends and placemen
The state is one of the chief obstacles to Russia's modernisation.
During the 2000s the number of bureaucrats almost doubled. A quarter of the
workforce is employed in the public sector. The total number of people who
depend on the state is between 35% and 40%, says Boris Grozovsky, a Russian
economic observer. This, he says, points to the share of the electorate that
benefits from the status quo. At election time municipal workers are bused in
to show support for Mr Putin. Meanwhile, the main purpose of Russia's civil
service is to shuffle papers around and extract administrative revenue from
firms and private citizens. The bureaucrats have little interest in fostering
competition that might cost them their jobs.
This is particularly true of the security services and prosecutors who
have been among the main beneficiaries of Mr Putin's rule. Alexander Bastrykin,
a faithful chief investigator, recently told a Russian state newspaper that
"privatisation is a threat that could finish off the Russian
economy." Suspicious of private business, the Kremlin has entrusted the
economy to state corporations, often run by former security servicemen and its
few friends. Whereas oligarchs in Boris Yeltsin's time were private businessmen
who influenced the running of the state, the Putin-era oligarchs are former KGB
men who have used state power to grab private businesses.
Some analysts estimate that these state companies control about half of
Russia's economy. They are sheltered from competition, soak up resources and
stoke inflation. State companies award contracts to nominally private companies
owned by friends and relatives of their managers. The Sochi Olympics are a
prime example: the biggest contracts were given to firms run by Mr Putin's
chums, including Arkady Rotenberg, his boyhood judo partner.
This sort of thing creates a system of perverse incentives, fosters
cynicism and cronyism and discourages those who want to use their initiative
and skills. One man has worked for two companies owned by Mr Putin's friends.
His latest employer is a firm owned by a close relative of a powerful
government official. "My salary is higher than I would get in an
independent firm, but my responsibility is much less. I add almost no value.
Connections decide everything," he says.
Although Russia still boasts some of the most entrepreneurial and hardy
businessmen, who are determined to succeed and continue to invest, many burn
out and leave. Economic activity in the country is waning, mergers and
acquisitions are drying up and capital and brains are flowing out of the
country. Evgeny Gavrilenkov, the chief economist at Sberbank, Russia's largest
state bank, says the problem is exacerbated by the central bank which, in order
to stimulate growth, is injecting liquidity into the market while also trying
to support the rouble. This allows banks and their clients to speculate in
foreign exchange rather than invest. Yet the main reasons for the slowdown in investment
are uncertainty about the future and the lack of proper legal title to
property.
Third time, not so lucky
Buying the loyalty of different interest groups is easy when the pie is
growing, but much harder when it is shrinking. Once incomes began to fall,
Gaidar predicted, the regime would face a choice between repression, which
would eventually lead to revolution, and democratisation, which might also mean
the loss of power. Mr Putin has tried to dodge that choice over the past year.
He has made decisions ad hoc: staging show trials for political activists and
locking up opposition leaders such as Alexei Navalny one day, then letting Mr
Navalny run for mayor of Moscow the next. At the end of last year he released
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a tycoon he had kept in jail for ten years, but expelled
him from the country. Spooked by the unrest in Ukraine, Russian prosecutors are
demanding five- and six-year jail sentences for Russia's own protesters. The
independent TV Rain channel, popular with those protesters, is under fire.
As a faithful son of the KGB, Mr Putin would prefer to deal with the
worsening economic situation as his one-time boss and political model, Yuri
Andropov, did in the 1980s. Andropov suppressed dissidents while trying to
modernise the economy from the top, thus keeping the regime secure. Mr Putin
believes that if Andropov had not died in 1984, his plan would have worked. Yet
he has also inherited a deep fear of unleashing the mass repressions and purges
which Andropov's generation of leaders agreed to abandon after Stalin's death,
in order to preserve themselves.
Skilful tactician though he is, Mr Putin does not seem to have a
strategy. He may be hoping that the oil price will recover. At present it has
stabilised at about $100 a barrel, but it is unlikely to stay there. With the
rise of fracking in America and elsewhere, analysts estimate that the price
could drop by 15% in the next six years.
Given the relatively low level of state debt, Russia could also start
borrowing more to keep the budget afloat. This is what the Soviet Union did
when the oil price fell. The Russian economy is far better equipped to deal
with an oil-price drop than the Soviet economy was. It has built up substantial
foreign-exchange reserves and has a floating exchange rate, which allows it to
adjust to a fall. However, given the level of imports, a currency devaluation
would hurt living standards and could lead to inflation higher than the present
6.7%. The unequal distribution of incomes in Russia means that, even if the
economy continues to tread water, the bottom 40% of the population will see
their economic situation worsen, says Mr Rogov.
Experts agree that, however the oil price moves, all scenarios
"carry the risk of administrative crisis, elite squabbles and
confrontation between the people and the regime". Even with the oil price
at its current level, attitudes to Mr Putin are changing fast, according to
Mikhail Dmitriev of the Centre for Strategic Research—who has recently been
removed from his post as the think-tank's president. Over the past year
discontent in the country at large has deepened and broadened, spreading across
all social groups and ages. In contrast, Moscow and St Petersburg, where GDP
per head is higher and infrastructure has improved, have become more stable and
even loyal.
Mr Dmitriev says the latest focus groups show that Mr Putin is less
associated with stability and more with uncertainty. His past achievements are
becoming a distant memory, and his recent stunts, such as flying with cranes or
diving for ancient amphorae, merely cause irritation. According to the Levada
Centre, a pollster, almost 50% of the country does not want him to remain
president after 2018 when his term expires. The change in mood has been caused
not so much by worsening personal circumstances, as by a growing concern that
the country is fast approaching a dead end. The danger for the world is that a
weaker Mr Putin may be a more aggressive one, in Ukraine and elsewhere.
©The Economist Newspaper Limited 2014
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