Sergey Aleksashenko: "Word and deed"

“You give privatization!” Dmitry Medvedev repeats at every possible opportunity. You give privatization, but not everywhere! – says Vladimir Putin. And... Nothing happens. Or rather, the opposite is happening - creeping nationalization... Another masterpiece of bureaucratic thought - renewal car production in Moscow, based on ZIL. It is well known that car production is not a very profitable business, especially when it comes to screwdriver assembly (and this is what we are talking about in this case. Profitability is 2-3%, but). This means that such a company needs to be extremely careful about its costs, trying to save on everything. In addition, it is known that car assembly production is a labor-intensive business, but (again, we are talking about screwdriver assembly) the requirements for the qualifications of workers are not very high, i.e. That is, the salary is not super high. And do you think it will be possible to make such production financially sustainable in Moscow, where the salary is twice as high as the Russian average, and there is an obvious shortage of labor? Maybe someone remembered the recipe from the Soviet past - invite limiters? I understand well the Moscow authorities, for whom ZIL is like a bone in the throat. And it takes up a lot of space, and the owner is the city. But are they (the people making the decisions) really mentally stuck in the 70s of the last century, when such projects - mechanical engineering production in the center of the largest European city - had the right to exist? By and large, the Moscow authorities should not care what kind of business will arise on the territory of ZIL; they should care about how many jobs there will be there and what taxes it will be able to collect from this business. And in such a situation, the Moscow authorities would need to announce a competition to create jobs on the territory of ZIL, giving a free stake in ZIL to the winner of such a competition. And, perhaps, even paying him for it. I understand well that it is impossible to predict the winner, but it will definitely not be a car assembly plant. Not a single businessman who invests his money will do this. However, I’m not even sure that Moscow needs to create new jobs - the unemployment rate in the city is less than 1%, which indicates a shortage, and not an excess, of labor. Perhaps it would be more correct to create a recreation area or an amusement park (although these are also jobs). In return, the Moscow authorities offer the state (and the city of Moscow is, according to Russian law, part of the state) to enter the car assembly business. The fate of such a project is well clear to me: a six-letter word, the second is “and”. A fiasco, in a word"