ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an integrative scholarly synthesis of the Western literature on economic growth. Modern theories of economic growth help explain the dynamic observed in the Russian economy. This chapter also draws inferences of modern theories of economic growth for the Post-Soviet Russia. The Russian economy still has a high rate of depreciation of principal capital. High rates of principal capital depreciation may be counterbalanced with high investment in research and development and professional management. The Russian economy shows a lack of incentives to invest in new technologies and innovations for production. The integrative scholarly synthesis reveals a major focus on savings in the main exogenous theories of economic growth. In these theories, achieving the optimal savings rate is considered as a guarantor of accumulating a stock of capital, necessary for economic growth. Labor as a factor of production is not less important than capital. Consequently, high employment rates may be not less important than savings. To the contrary, poor labor utilization likely leads to a loss in the gross volume of production. The transition economy of the 1990s was distinct with high levels of unemployment. This problem of insufficient labor utilization persists in the Russian economy through the 2000s and 2010s.
