Assessing the resilience of Russia’s economy to internal and external challenges

The competition between the world economy leaders and contenders, which has intensified dramatically in the 21st century, resulted in the formation of a new global geo-economic reality. Its features include dissemination of aggressive tools like trade wars, secondary and tertiary sanctions, and hybrid conflicts to influence competitors’ economic systems. Against the background of these circumstances coinciding with the rise of the sixth wave of innovation, there is a growing need to study the issue of raising the resistance of the economy to internal and external challenges. In this paper the resilience of the Russian economy is considered in the context of achieving economic sovereignty. We develop our own methodology for assessing its condition in terms of industrial, technological, structural and geo-economic components. The novelty of our approach is as follows: we combine end-to-end consideration of external factors influencing the resilience of the country’s economy; we abandon thresholds in favor of comparing accounting periods with the baseline period, and use a floating scale of assessment. In order to avoid data subjectivization we use only transparent information and statistical materials from Rosstat, World Bank, WTO, OECD and other official institutions. The methodology was tested on the 2015-2022 time period, which made it possible to identify weak spots in the country’s economic resilience system and develop a three-stage strategy for strengthening it. The major task of the first stage is to design a set of measures to protect and support the most vulnerable industries and those affected by sanctions pressure on the principles of “reciprocal protectionism”; at the second stage we propose to launch a restructuring of the economic system based on “enlightened semi-isolationism”; at the third stage it is vital to shift to “reasonable protectionism” with the task of integrating the national economy into the sixth wave of innovation. The results obtained can be used by the authorities of the Russian Federation when developing and adjusting the counter-sanctions strategy.