Methodology to assess the efficiency of the Russian Federation foreign economic activity

Abstract

Foreign economic activity is of paramount priority for Russia. At the same time, the historically developed, specific economic characters of the country contributed to formation of an inefficient and economically insecure structure of the foreign economic activity which resulted in explicit resource-based nature of the Russian export, concentration of the investment capital in fuel/raw material and trade industry branches, high reliance on the import to the prejudice of the domestic production development, low competitive level of the goods produced locally, etc. These specifics of the Russian foreign economic activity make the state economic welfare highly dependent on global market conditions, scale up foreign economic risks and make the economy vulnerable to crisis developments which require the measures aimed to protect the national interests of the country. In order to justify die structure and value of the foreign economic activity as well as to develop the ways to increase its efficiency in state profile, it is required, first and foremost, to develop new approaches to its analysis. This study proposes a new way to assess the efficiency of the Russian Federation foreign economic activity, justifies the approach from theoretical point of view and includes economic and mathematical methods enabling to improve accuracy when measuring the input of the foreign economic activity into the national economy