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Experts are looking for a way to save monoregions
Representatives of the expert community tried to develop an anti-crisis plan for Russian single-industry towns yesterday during a round table at the Institute of Contemporary Development. Analysts have long been saying that the economic crisis is dealing a painful blow to small towns, the majority of whose working population is employed at the only city-forming enterprise.As noted by the head of the Center for Social Policy at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Evgeniy Gontmakher, similar problems are characteristic of other settlements, which, although not single-industry towns in the full sense of the word, are economically largely dependent on some large enterprise, such as Tolyatti, Cherepovets, Lipetsk. From this point of view, we can even talk about entire mono-regions - as an example, Mr. Gontmakher cited the Vologda region, three-quarters of whose budget is formed from revenues from Severstal.
President of the New Eurasia Foundation Andrei Kortunov added that city-forming enterprises, in addition to direct tax contributions to the budget, bear the costs of maintaining a significant part of the infrastructure in single-industry towns. Mr. Kortunov is convinced that a way out of the crisis in this situation is possible only on the basis of public-private partnership. At the same time, businesses are encouraged to optimize corporate social responsibility programs “instead of ill-considered cost reductions.”
“There is a presumption that social programs are something that can be sacrificed for now, and if they improve, costs can be increased again and the balance that existed before the crisis restored,” the president of “New Eurasia” explained his thought. “But from a strategic point of view, this is a losing option.” It leads in the short term to an increase in social tension, and in the long term to the degradation of human capital and the collapse of the existing social structure.”
Deputy General Director of the Siberian Coal Energy Company Sergei Grigoriev joined what was said. “Our company is closely connected with 34 single-industry towns, where people have been accustomed to mining coal not even since Soviet times, but since Tsarist times,” he said. “We are faced with the need to mitigate the consequences of the crisis, because if people leave now, then in a couple of years, when the price of coal rises again, there will be nowhere to get qualified personnel. Therefore, our task is to prevent migration.”
The Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Irkutsk Mortgage Agency, Vladimir Shcherbakov, immediately proposed solving the employment problem during the crisis by deploying a large-scale housing construction program. Evgeny Gontmakher liked the idea: “America got out of the great crisis by building roads, and we can get out of it by building housing.” The panelists then delved into a discussion of what is meant by the term “affordable housing.”
Mr. Shcherbakov voiced the following criteria for “affordability”: housing that a family of three people (two workers) with an average income for a given territory can purchase with a 15-year mortgage loan, paying 30% of their own funds as a down payment. The monthly payment should not exceed a third of the family income, the interest rate should not exceed 11-12%. As an example, Mr. Shcherbakov cited the UK, where housing affordability is calculated using a coefficient derived from the ratio between the average salary and the cost per square meter. “With an availability coefficient of 3.5, everything is in order, above six the government takes emergency measures, and in our country this indicator is approximately eight,” explained Mr. Shcherbakov.
The idea of housing construction was also supported by Sergei Grigoriev, who stated that “the coal industry releases mainly related specialists, including mining builders; they could participate in housing construction programs.”
The enthusiasm of the round table participants was somewhat cooled by Sergei Skudarnov, Deputy General Director of the ROSA-Holding company for production. “Business is ready to create structures, including housing construction,” he said. “But to do this, we first need to create a regulatory framework and give the heads of municipalities a free hand.”
However, heads of municipalities should have freer hands starting from January 1, 2009, when federal law No. 131 “On the general principles of organizing local self-government” came into full force. And the discussion participants decided to formalize their proposals on housing construction in the form of a kind of “conceptual document”, which, in the words of Mr. Gontmakher, “can be moved somewhere - to the president, to the government, to the RSPP.”