Dmitry Didenko – PhD in History, Senior Analyst with the State corporation «Bank for Development and Foreign Economic Affairs (‘Vnesheconombank’)», 9, Academik Sakharov Av., 107996, Moscow, Russian Federation; E-mail: ddidenko@bloomberg.net

Based on the data provided by the international organisations (UNCTAD, UNESCO, OECD) and by the Bank of Russia the author explores competitiveness of Russian knowledge-intensive production in the service sector. As the theoretical basis the author applies the concept of creative economy which emerged in the process of academic discussions [Howkins, 2011; Florida, 2007] and joint efforts by the international organisations (WIPO, WTO, UNDP, UNESCO, UNCTAD). For assessment of realised competitiveness the author utilises a set of relative indicators widely used in the literature: 1) trade coverage of imports by exports; 2) net export coefficient; 3) coefficient of revealed comparative advantages – Balassa index.

The conclusions are the following:

– On the global services market Russian economic agents are more likely to demonstrate enhanced knowledge intensity and competitiveness comparing to the merchandise sector.

– Similar to the merchandise sector, Russian economic agents tend to expose their propensity rather to import products of the creative industries than to export them.

– Relatively high volume of accumulated human capital presumes a significant potential of competitiveness for Russian knowledge economy.

– The data from the Bank of Russia, as well as from the UNCTAD, show an increase in knowledge intensity of the Russian foreign trade in services and the trend towards their competitiveness improvement. However, unlike the data on the core group of creative services from the UNCTAD, the data on their extended group from the Bank of Russia result in lower values of competitiveness indicators.

– Russian educational services competitiveness is price-based, rather than quality-based, with a persistent dependency on the Soviet-era experience.

– The prospective areas for Russian knowledge-intensive services are in research and development; in advertising, market research, and public opinion polling; engineering and technical services; as well as computer and information services. The markets in the CIS countries and, to a lesser extent, those in Eastern Europe, are expected to be the most promising in these fields. India and China besides the CIS countries are supposed to become prospective markets for educational services.