Empirical analysis of post-crisis development of Russian manufacturing enterprises

<p style="text-align: center;">Abstract</p><p>This paper is an empirical study of post-crisis development of Russian manufacturing enterprises. The aim of this paper was to identify the most common trajectories of post-crisis development of enterprises, and the definition of internal and external factors that determine a particular path.</p><p>Integrated data base of this study consists of an empirical survey data of manufacturing enterprises conducted by HSE in 2009, accounting data from SPARK data base, eхpert rating of democracy of Russian regions and data on the entire population of the Russian manufacturing enterprises from RUSLANA data base.</p><p>Methodological approach is based on combination of methods of hierarchical cluster analysis to highlight companies with different development trajectory and binary logistic regression to assess the influence of the main factors in the economic behavior of enterprises in the pre-crisis period and the parameters of the institutional environment, which determined the trajectory of their post-crisis performance.</p><p>We identified two most common trajectories of post-crisis performance of Russian manufacturing enterprises - &quot;dynamic growth&quot; and &quot;stagnation.&quot; The analysis provided an evidence that significant internal factors determining chances of the firm to find itself in a &ldquo;good&rdquo; cluster is restructuring in the pre-crisis period (modernization of production facilities, job creation complemented with improvement of business processes), the presence of foreign owners. In addition, the trajectory of the company in 2007-2012 is significantly influenced by the quality of the regional institutional environment, namely, by the level of corruption. Robustness checks proved stability of econometric analysis&rsquo; results.</p><p>Policy recommendations based on research results could assist state authorities in development of more effective programs to support businesses during and after the crisis. Among the required measures &ndash; a support for modernization and restructuring, recovery of investment activities needed for upgrading of production assets, as well as fight against corruption at all levels of state institutions.</p>