DEFRAGMENTATION OF ECONOMIC GROWTH WITH A FOCUS ON DIVERSIFICATION: EVIDENCE FROM RUSSIAN ECONOMY

In this paper, we develop a comprehensive analysis of diversification issues for Russian economy. Assessing diversification for nine different variables, we show that choice of a variable affects the result much, and that, unlike a popular opinion, equiproportional economic diversity measures are still useful in economic analysis. Developing a simple defragmentation of economic growth, we account for labor productivity and labor availability separately, and show that these components depend on different factors. We discover some factors that are rarely studied. We argue that they can become a hard constraint for long-term economic growth.