RUSSIAN FEDERATION: GENERAL METADATA

Data documentation

General notes

Although Russia is a federation comprising 83 sub-national jurisdictions [1], a cursory review of regional policies suggests that the overall value of sub-national support for fossil fuels is much less significant than that of federal support. This is partly because Russia possesses a highly centralised budgetary and fiscal system, which acts to limit the amounts of support that can be provided by the country’s provinces, republics, districts, and territories. While there exists a few regional spending programmes that provide targeted support to the local oil and natural-gas industry (e.g., support for exploration and research activities or expenditure in relation to environmental liabilities), beneficiaries tend to be small- or medium-sized companies receiving small amounts of support.

Regional government ownership of upstream oil and gas enterprises is very limited. More common is the ownership of electric-power utilities by these governments. However, even though this ownership results in considerable decision-making power over the purchase of natural gas as fuel for electricity generation, transactions are generally market-driven while natural-gas prices remain regulated at the federal level (see the country overview). The measures listed in this inventory are therefore predominantly federal in nature despite the fact that Russia is formed of a large number of sub-national jurisdictions.

The fiscal year in Russia coincides with the calendar year.

Methodological note

A large part of support to fossil fuels in non-OECD countries takes the form of price controls or regulations benefitting final consumers. In many cases, this occurs through the government mandating state-owned oil and gas companies to charge lower retail prices, which lowers the revenues these companies collect through their sales of fuel. This sometimes results in the government subsequently intervening to compensate state-owned oil and gas companies for the losses they incurred in the downstream sector due to the regulated prices, with this compensation taking many forms. Some governments choose, for example, to compensate national oil and gas companies through targeted tax concessions (e.g., VAT exemptions) or equity injections.

This inventory focusses on the direct budgetary transfers and tax expenditures that encourage the production or consumption of fossil fuels, including those benefitting national oil and gas companies. For this reason, some of the measures classified here under "Producer Support Estimate" may have been introduced by governments with a view to compensating domestic, vertically integrated oil and gas companies for the lower prices they are required to charge at the retail level, resulting in these measures being connected to some extent to consumer support.

Estimates of the support directly conferred to final consumers by regulated prices are available from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which estimates these induced transfers as part of its annual World Energy Outlook publication. Readers are therefore advised not to add together the OECD and IEA estimates given the significant risk of overlap and double-counting this involves.

Producer Support Estimate

Readers are advised that some fiscal measures related to oil and natural-gas production may not constitute tax expenditures under an alternative baseline where resource taxes (or production taxes) vary with market conditions and production costs. This inventory uses the annual amounts of tax expenditures as reported by the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation or other government agencies.

Footnotes:

[1] The Russian federation currently consists of 46 oblasts (provinces), 21 republics, 9 krais (territories), 4 autonomous okrugs (districts), 2 federal cities (Moscow and Saint Petersburg), and one autonomous oblast, for a total of 83 sub-national jurisdictions.