Labor productivity: The national challenge and national project
Subject. The paper examines major factors influencing the labor productivity at micro- and macrolevels and analyzes the fact sheet of the national project, Labor Productivity and Employment Support, revealing its main drawbacks. Objectives. The study identifies macroeconomic conditions in Russia and reveals the main obstacles to an increase in labor productivity of the Russian economy. Methods. The study employs a systems analysis, statistical analysis, institutional analysis. Results. We revealed systemic challenges to the development of the Russian economy that cause the low labor productivity, i.e. low pay, high interest rate on loans, poor manpower protection, dramatic disparity in property, poor protection of ownership, uncertainty in the future, excessive business regulation. Conclusions and Relevance. We found key challenging aspects of the nations project, since it lacks a consistent and integral approach, pursues the attainment of input indicators (the number of stakeholders, volume of assimilated funds) instead of output ones (labor productivity growth, pooling project development competencies within a company, project performance management and performance appraisal. Having analyzed the fact sheet of the national project, we inferred that a very disputable approach is used to address the issue, that is, putting resources and efforts into partial results, which are very likely to have no synergistic effects on the overall economy, since they skip the cause-and-effect ties of socio-economic processes. The findings can prove useful for improving the national policy for labor productivity management.