On 20 October, in its latest report, the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation criticized the state support allocated for the socio-economic development of the North Caucasus regions in 2017-2019, reported vestnikkavkaza.
The report read that “in 2017-2018, 8.8 billion rubles were allocated for the implementation of the state program to develop the North Caucasus Federal District until 2025, of which 5.5 billion rubles were allocated from the federal budget. In 2019, another 2.4 billion rubles were allocated from the federal budget for the program, but the investment climate in the North Caucasus Federal District has not improved, only a few investment projects were successfully completed, and problems in the labor market remain.
“During this time, only 9 investment projects out of 27 were completed. 577 jobs were created in the region, which does not affect the situation at all, since about 70 thousand new jobs are created in the macroregion annually. Only 22% of the planned volume of extra-budgetary investments was attracted in 2017, and 36% in 2018,” said the author Svetlana Orlova. “The mechanism for selecting, financing and implementing projects is complex, non-transparent and fraught with corruption risks." Joint-stock companies of constituent entities of the North-Caucasian Federal District receive money, while the federal authorities do not have the authority to participate in the management of their activities,” she added.
The Ministry of North Caucasus Affairs agreed with the conclusions of the Accounts Chamber as a whole but indicated that it was due to a delay in implementation deadlines. According to the head of the department Sergey Chebotarev, the number of implemented investment projects reached 12 after the Accounts Chamber's examination, and by the end of the year it is planned to complete another 10 projects. This will create another 1000 jobs and attract 6.6 billion rubles in non-state investments.
Besides the Accounts Chamber’s report, “Rosstat” (Federal Service for State Statistics) also published their report in terms of the number of families which can only afford to buy food and clothing with their current income, reported the Caucasian Knot. The highest percentage of such families was registered in Ingushetia (78.8%), the Krasnodar Territory (69.2%), the Astrakhan Region (68.8%), and Adygea (67.8%), with Kabardino-Balkaria (30.1% of families) and the Stavropol Territory (27.5%) being the newcomers in the list.
According to a study conducted by Vladimir Kolosov et al. in 2017 on the goals, limitations, problems and results of the economic development of the North Caucasian, the states in the North Caucasus are marked by stable population growth, but do not indicate high rates of economic growth. This is due to the fact that “large-scale projects based on federal or regional investments yield contradictory results. On the one hand, they undoubtedly favor modernization of local communities, including the creation of transparent relationships unconnected with clannish or ethnic networks. On the other hand, large investments in the North Caucasus are often connected with corruption and seldom provide an immediate multiplicative effect, sometimes even leading to negative consequences.”
