Opening address of editor-in-chief.

“Our main problem is not an oil needle. The fact that we extract a lot of oil and gas is great, it provides us complete energy independence. But we are sitting on the import needle, and this is a problem”, said Viktor Viktorovich Ivanter, RAS academician, Scientific Director of the RAS Institute of Economic Forecasting. In his conversation with Natalia Leskova, a special correspondent for the ES magazine, he expressed his thoughts on the current economic situation in Russia.

In order to monitor the state of industrial production and to build a system of industry balances, on request of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation, the State Industry Information System (SIIS) was created, which became a new tool for providing services for all subjects of industrial activity — from enterprises and industry experts to federal executive bodies. It contains information on the current state and forecasts on the Russian industry development, current state programs and priority projects, the nomenclature and production volumes of the main types of industrial products. The main peculiarities of SIIS introduction, its basic tasks and functions were covered by Vladimir Vladimirovich Raspopov, Deputy Director of the Industry Development Fund, in his interview with the ES magazine.

The paper addresses the issue of forming an intelligent digital infrastructure for managing the country’s economy in special conditions: global disasters, catastrophes and emergencies. The experience of creating large information systems for managing the country’s economy in a special period is evaluated. The convergent approach for creating the required system for management support is proposed. It is shown that under these conditions, high management efficiency can be achieved on the basis of special support for self-organization processes and anti-collapse self-adjusting integration of information system segments and intelligent services that are adaptable to conditions of a known, predictable and unknown nature. At the same time, the integration of network infrastructures involves the distributed processing and storage of data based on interaction and integration of various network environments, which allows to achieve previously unattainable reliability, stability and recoverability of economic management.

2018 did not bring a significant breakthrough in the Russian digital economy development, the boom is being replaced by disappointment. Digital transformation as a process of cardinal change is gradually being superseded by numeralization or digitalization, that is, simply by converting “everything” into digital form. At the same time, practical issues concerning approaches of the state bodies to implementation of digital economy plans both in the nearest future and in the 5–10 years prospect, stay out of the attention zone. Of paramount importance becomes the discussion by the authorities not about the processes of effective changes in the economy, but the accelerated introduction of foreign digital technologies or provision of services on digital platforms. The article proposes to discuss two stratagems that will allow the government bodies of the Russian Federation to consolidate their leadership position in the digital transformation process, not only by implementing control and supervisory functions, but also through providing greater economic opportunities to large, medium and small businesses based on numeral.

The article publishes research results of the strategic behavior of modern organizations in the field of human resources management in terms of digitalization. The study sample — 250 companies from the Forbes list in 2008. The annual reports data of organizations in the selected years was used as the main research material. Within the study framework, it is hypothesized that in conditions of digitalization substantial shifts occur in the systems of strategic HR management of organizations.

In the process of development, the scientific (natural philosophy, Baconian) perception paradigm faces at least two cognitive limits, the first of which is due to insufficient dimension of human thinking, its inability to accommodate all scientific knowledge (Leibnitz limit), and the second is related to internal paradox and latent groundlessness of the paradigm itself.

Considering all the measures taken by central banks of the leading countries to overcome the global financial crisis of 2007–2009, one might have expected that economies would grow at a higher pace. However, their growth remains rather unstable. This puts the question of how modern economy retains the capability to adequately respond to applied measures of impact.

The issue of the connection of current macroeconomic policy measures and structural changes is being investigated. Approaches that focus on the behavior of macroaggregates, as a rule, do not take into account the structural and institutional characteristics of the economic system. These characteristics are now becoming relevant in the field of economic development. Macroeconomic policy is based on a transfer mechanism, which is a set of measures and instruments that affect economic dynamics. However, until now the transfer mechanism of macroeconomic policy has changed, without taking into account structural and institutional characteristics — the Keynesian prescriptions have been replaced by monetarist, “offer economics”, “real cycle theory”, and theoretical generalizations were the basis of the transfer mechanism. The modern economy is changing so rapidly that the fundamental generalizations lag behind the pace of these changes, which leads experts responsible for macroeconomic policy to develop measures according to the practical feasibility and vision of solving certain problems, sometimes based on a priori established connection of individual parameters, for example, the money supply and GDP, inflation and employment levels, or inflation and money supply, etc. Usually the presence of feedbacks is considered weakly, as well as does not subordinate the measures of the current policy of the country’s development strategy, since the strategic program is simply another set of tools that should lead to different results.

Changing of a conjuncture index of “Economic strategy” (CIES) for 2018 is considered. The contribution of indicators of supply and demand in CIES is estimated. The analysis of industrial production is carried out.