Taxes and Technologies: Past, Present and Future of the Russian Tax System

Abstract

The article deals with the long-term trends in the development of the tax system of the Russian Federation. To identify them, the authors analyze co-evolution of production technologies, economic institutions and taxes instead of applying the standard financial methodological tools. The results show that the transformations of the Russian tax system generally were in line with he development of technologies and institutions. This allows us to outline the future contours of the tax system associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. For this purpose, three stages in the latest economic history of the Russian Federation were specially selected: an old-industrial (1991–1998), post-industrial (1999–2008), and neo-industrial (from 2009 to the present) ones. The analysis demonstrated that the new tax system of the Russian Federation was designed during the old industrial stage, featured by a painful economic restructuring. The experience gained was used to reform the tax system at the next stage, which followed the 1998 default and was characterized by a rapid recovery of the economy, primarily due to the growth of the extractive industry, but also due to the transformation of taxes: state control over the tax base for hydrocarbons was restored and the share of resource rents assigned by the state was sharply increased. This allowed restoring the country's economic sovereignty, creating foreign exchange reserves and increasing the consolidated budget revenues. Due to the global financial crisis, another transformation of the Russian tax system was required to meet the challenges of new industrialization based on cyber-physical technologies. The latter are already successfully used in the tax administration system. Now we should expect a restructuring of the entire tax system based on the principles of digital tax algorithmization, real-time data associated with the particular business transaction, and automatic tax calculation and tax payments under smart contracts within the state economic policy framework.