The Dependence of the Potential Sustainability of a Resource Economy on the Initial State: a Comparison of Models Using the Example of Russian Oil Extraction

The studies of the International Monetary Fund offer a model for recom-mending sustainable budget policy to oil-exporting countries including Russia. The model does not contain any resource as a factor of production and assumes that Russian oil reserves will be exhausted by the middle of the 21st century. The current paper examines the sustainability of open and closed models, which are calibrated on Russia’s data and include a resource as a factor of production. The open-model case shows that monotonic economic growth is impossible given the current state of the Russian economy. This paper offers an approach for estimating changes that improve long-term sustainability.