Ways to improve lending to real economy

Improving the mechanisms and instruments of lending to real economy is an important area of increasing the pace of socio-economic development of territories. The article analyzes the importance of the banking sector resources in the economy and concludes that it has increased in recent years. The purpose of the article is to identify areas and develop a set of measures to improve the availability and role of lending to sector economy as one of the key factors in enhancing the socio-economic development of territories. The methodological framework of the study consists of principles of economic, statistical, and comparative analysis, and of generalization. As a result of considering lending trends based on statistical data of the Federal State Statistics Service, the Central Bank of Russia, the information portal Banks.ru and others, it is concluded that the concentration on the major banks with predominant “state banks” directs the market to competition reduction and possible new problems that lead to infusion of significant amounts of public funds to support such credit institutions. At the same time, the number of subjects of country’s constituent entities where there are no own regional banks, increases every year. It is revealed that the fundamental weakness of regional banking systems prevents the creation of a stable financial basis for expanded reproduction of economic entities. The article proposes a set of measures to increase the contribution of the banking system resources to increase the pace of economic development of territories, including the expansion of the mechanism of capitalization to regional banks, changes in the interest rate policy of credit institutions in the framework of financing investment projects, increasing the limits of subsidized loans to priority economic sectors for the purposes of technical re-equipment and import substitution, and easing the regulatory standards of lending when assessing the quality of debt service and the financial situation of borrowers. The research results may be in demand among the authorities for adjusting the financial policy; they can also be useful to experts and the scientific community involved in the development of lending to real economy.