Assessment of Turbulence in the Industrial Environment of the Russian Machine-Building Complex

In recent years, the term "turbulence" has been increasingly used to describe the state of the environment for business entities. The analysis of the identified approaches to defining its essence provides grounds for treating turbulence as an integral, essential and, most importantly, complex characteristic of the external environment. The relevance of its study is determined by the increasing speed of change, increasing complexity and uncertainty, mutual influence of changes in the national economy and its individual industries and, as a consequence, the need to take into account the level of turbulence in the justification of strategic decisions at any level. At the same time, in modern publications we could not find any studies focused on the peculiarities of assessing the turbulence of the industry and, accordingly, correct quantitative approaches to its implementation. The aim of this study is to develop a method of quantitative assessment of the level of industry turbulence in the case of machine-building industries. The scientific hypothesis of the research is as follows: the level of turbulence of a particular branch of modern Russian industry is defined by the variability of indicators characterising its condition. The methods of the research were structural-logical and matrix analysis, tools of statistical data processing. The quantitative method developed to assess the industry turbulence includes such steps as the choice, taking into account the accepted assumptions, of evaluation indicators, justification of the decision regarding the use of the coefficient of variation as a tool for assessing their variability, collection of the necessary information, calculation and interpretation of the results. The testing on a sample of 17 machine-building sub-sectors by assessing the turbulence of each for a 10-year period confirmed the hypothesis of the study and showed a significant differentiation of industries by the level of turbulence. The key role in the formation of the turbulence level of the modern Russian machine-building industry is played by the degree of its technological sophistication and import dependence. The obtained results allow us to assess the state of the environment of various industries objectively enough, which should increase the degree of the validity of strategic decision-making at all levels of economic activity.