The Contribution of Intangible Assets to the Growth of the Russian Economy

This paper studies the change in the contribution of intangible assets to economic growth in Russia after applying the Corrado, Hulten and Sichel (2005) approach to estimate an extended list of intangible assets. As a result, intangible assets contribution increased from 0.05 p.p to 0.15 p.p of 3.28 percent of growth in Russia in the period 2004–2014. These estimates show that the inclusion of the expanded list of intangible assets increases growth and redistributes production growth between capital accumulation and the growth of multifactor productivity towards capital accumulation, and between the accumulation of tangible capital and intangible capital towards intangible capital. The results differ from European countries, where intangible assets formed 9 percent of growth in 2004–2014. Comparing the structure of intangible assets in Russia and in Europe and the US, we conclude that in Russia, the highest contribution to the growth of intangible assets is due to intellectual property, while in developed countries, the contributions are distributed more evenly across different types of intangible assets under consideration.