"CULTURE IS A FACTOR OF LABOR PRODUCTIVITY"

Abstract

In his interview to the Russian Peasant Studies, Sergei Kiselev, the Head of the Department of Agricultural Economics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University, refers to the facts of his biography to provide an extensive overview of the evolution of some important approaches in the Russian and foreign agrarian economic science and politics in the late 20th — early 21st centuries. The interview focuses on the agrarian and economic policy of the perestroika, the creation of the Agrarian Institute headed by the Academician A.A. Nikonov, the interaction of the state regulation of agriculture with emerging market-economy institutions and relations. One of the topics of the interview is the long-term accession of Russia to the WTO as connected with negotiations on various areas of the economy and especially on agriculture, in which Kiselev took part. The interview also describes the studies of foreign agrarian economies, especially of the USA, which were conducted by meetings of Kiselev with American farmers, scientists and businessmen. When describing the current development of the Russian agriculture Kiselev stresses that Russia has reached a plateau of economic indicators, and to increase them the country needs a substantial increase in agricultural labor productivity, which depends not only on the successes of the national economy as a whole, but also on the quality of agricultural science and education, and the most important factor of their successful improvement is culture in the most extensive and deep meaning of the word.