«An Imaginary Patient» or What Should Be the Financing of Patronized Goods

The article discusses the problems of budget financing of patronized goods in the sphere of culture, education and science, the peculiarity of which is the presence of the well-known pat­tern of «Baumol's disease» or «Cost Disease». A theoretical analysis and empirical calculations were presented, which confirmed this pattern on the example of Russian theaters. A concept was proposed, – «technological productivity», which, in the author’s opinion, was more consistent with the content of «the cost disease» and with the phenomenon of performance lag in perfor­ming arts from overall productivity in the economy, which determined the impossibility of their market self-sufficiency. In contrast to the standard theory, according to which financing of pat­ronized goods is interpreted as government actions, aimed at compensating the expenses of producers of these special goods and services, this work uses a different approach, according to which the budget funds allocated to producers of patronized goods should be considered qualityof services. It was shown that the equilibrium conditions for the patronized goods can state pay­ment for the recoverable social usefulness of the corresponding goods and serve as a theoretical justification for determining the total (gross) income of their producers in the form of the sum of revenue and budget subsidies, which is also consistent with the system of national accounts. To measure the real value of total income, the components of which are deflated by different price indices, a composite index was proposed in its simple, parametric and normative form, and the dynamics of real total income and the full performance of theaters in the period from 2001 through 2018 were calculated. The article presented a methodology for the monetary as­sessment of the social utility of patronized goods in the cultural sphere – the size of the budget subsidy, which is based on the normative principle of equality between the growth rate of total labor productivity in performing arts organizations and the growth rate of productivity in the economy. On its basis, the dynamics of the minimum level of budget subsidies to theaters were calculated and the sizes of their underfunding in certain years of the period from 2001 through 2018 were determined.