FINANCIALIZATION OF ECONOMIC GROWTH AND THE RUSSIAN NATIONAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM

The last decades was been marked by the financialization of the world economy, i. e. the faster development of the financial system as compared with other sectors. This process lost its pace but did not stop after the global financial crisis of 2007–2009. However, in the post-crisis years, it is continuing against the background of the international financial system restructuring and the changing role and place of developing countries therein. The paper analyzes the current stage of the global financialization and outlines the specificity of this process in Russia. With the use of cross-country comparisons as well as extensive financial statistics data, it is shown that the Russian economy has failed to be fully integrated into the above development trend. Neither the internal nor the external investment potentials of the financialization are being utilized in full due to imperfections of both the institutions for mobilizing financial resources and the institutions that convert the latter to long-term investments. Inside the country, the “financialization” scale of the economic growth is assessed as very modest, near to “definancialization”. There is a predominance of bank intermediation while non-banking sectors remain underdeveloped; meanwhile, the liquidity surplus accumulated in the banking system since 2016 does not lead to a significant increase in lending to the real sector. Corporate and government borrowings through financial markets by bond issues are still at a low level. The global potential of financialization is noted to be underutilized too because Russian financial institutions do not fully cope with the role of the transmission mechanism between international funding sources and the demand of the domestic economy for investment, especially under sanctions. Their inability to use foreign financial flows for this purpose, unlike China and India, has become one of the reasons for the loss of investment attractiveness of the national economy. The research findings prove that the lack of depth and the institutional instability of the Russian financial system impose serious constraints on the investment process whose significance for reaching a new trajectory of sustainable economic growth can be hardly overestimated. Seeking ways to overcome these constraints by joint efforts of both national financial market players, including major banks, and financial regulators could be subject for further discussion.

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