Pattern of Growth

Russian statistics concerning the manufacturing organization and enterprises, the scope of their privatization, and the resulting shares of the state and of the private sector are neither consistent nor easily disentangled. According to the official data, the number of manufacturing organizations and enterprises amounted in 1944 to 212,000 and in 1998 to 339,000. The number of manufacturing enterprises was given as 138,000 and 161,000 during the same period. Subtracting the latter data from the former, we find that the number of manufacturing organizations amounted to 74,000 in 1994 and to as much as 178,000 by 1998. As I already indicated in Chapter 20, the large and medium-sized enterprises included in the privatization program had to change into joint-stock companies, and the state, as we will see immediately, retained various positions within them. Many other groups of manufacturing enterprises followed undoubtedly the same legal transformation. Much of the growth of the manufacturing enterprises was due to the rapid creation of numerous small industrial enterprises. In 1992, for instance, the number of manufacturing enterprises totaled 25,244; by 1998, their total number was 161,000, out of which 134,180 were officially described as small enterprises. In both cases, the number of large enterprises amounts to 25,281 and 27,000 respectively, figures not far from the total of such enterprises in 1990, namely 26,900.

Table 23-1 presents the numbers and composition of the manufacturing enterprises by main branches.