By Yuri Reshetnikov

Russia calls for equal partnership with US in high technology exchange

TAPESCRIPT 7

Trade turnover between Russia and the United States last year amounted to about 25 billion dollars. US and Russia trade officials have been mapping out plans for joint actions to expand trade cooperation, which both sides believe has enough room for further expansion and diversification.

Russian trade and economy officials have long complained that trade between the two countries is lop-sided where Russian exports of raw materials prevail, while US exports of high technology to Russia remains affected by heavy US government oversight and control, like in the old Soviet times. In those years each item of US exports to Soviet Russia was heavily scrutinized and US-Soviet trade remained largely a commodity exchange business. These days, however, the pattern of US-Russian trade has changed considerably, although Russian raw materials still dominate in the overall exports from Russia to the United States. But now US companies are looking to expand technology investments in the Russian market, targeting primarily software development and information technologies.

Russia’s first vice-premier Sergei Ivanov last month called for taking what he called political and economic steps to improve Russian-US partnership in high-technology trade. Sergei Ivanov told a government commission on export control that this country needs to adopt drastic measures at the government level to make Russian-American cooperation in high technology equal and mutually beneficial in character. So far, the Russian government official implied, such cooperation is neither equal nor mutually beneficial.

Sergei Ivanov pointed out that the US high tech market is particularly important to Russia, not merely from the point of immediate profits, but more importantly from the point of helping Russia switch to an innovative economy, an issue that is being widely discussed in Russia and which spells an overhaul of outmoded industries and technologies and their gradual replacement with the latest business trends.

The Russian government official noted that the annual export of Russian high-technology products to the United States alone amounts to a little more than 1.3 billion dollars. But business ties with the US side in this field are rough-and-tumble. In a number of specific areas, he said, they are seriously hampered by various factors, occasionally of purely political nature. “Administrative trade barriers are still in place in the United States that restrict Russian customers to advanced US technologies and some Russian enterprises are penalized by restrictive and discriminatory measures by the US government that are hard to explain from the point of international law,” Sergei Ivanov said.

These days Russian engineers are known to provide their skills in the development of Boeing’s Dreamliner aircraft and Russia is exporting rocket engines for use in the United States. But Russia has yet to tap its full potential in high-technology exports overseas. The United States, likewise, has yet to lift whatever unreasonable restrictions it has on exports of its own high-tech products to Russia.

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