Арктика и Север (Sep 2020)
The Courage of Economic Decisions and Modern Development of the Russian Arctic
Abstract
The article analyzes the phenomenon of the courage of economic decisions in the development of the Arctic. Courage is understood as a feature of contractual behavior - the ability to radically change or propose new terms of the development contract, which leads to dramatic shifts in the territorial, technological and organizational structure of the development process. In the modern development of the Arctic, new factors are considered that affect the courage of economic decisions. First of all, these are climate changes, which are pushing back the limits for marine logistics, development and extraction of natural resources in the Arctic from offshore platforms. The paper also considers the manifestations of developmental courage as a result of "infection" of large corporations from small venture companies and as a forced result of contractual in-tercorporate conflict. For modern development, the important factors that determine the courage of decisions are logistics, platform technologies and the complete or partial rejection of the use of icebreakers in favor of specialized vessels of the reinforced ice class. A point assessment of the courage of economic decisions for 24 projects of modern development of Arctic resources was carried out using the U-ETO algorithm: according to 12 indicators grouped in blocks of "unique-ness", "environment", "technologies", "organization". As a result of the assessment, it was con-cluded that the courage of economic decisions is not directly related to the capital intensity of in-vestment projects: relatively modest mining projects for new development can outperform ultra-capital-intensive investment projects for the development of hydrocarbons (for e.g., Bovanenkovo or Vankor) if they rely on innovative technologies, organizational structure and the marine envi-ronment for its logistics, mining and processing. A major contradiction in the modern develop-ment of the Russian Arctic is the contrast between the uniqueness of the natural assets of the field and the traditional methods of its development.
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