Is it logistics instead of productive forces' placement on the national market of alcoholic products?

The paper formulates the hypothesis about negative consequences of actual curtailing of the Council for the Study of Productive Forces' activity with more than 100-year history. Subject of research is domestic market for alcohol; relevant statistical data are published since 2010 by Federal Service for Alcohol Market Regulation. The paper emphasizes the problems of the domestic production of ethyl alcohol rectified from food raw material. These problems are extremely important in the course of its rising export in 2014-2017 and lively discussions of an introduction of the state monopoly. Authors believe that sharp decrease of quantity of ethyl alcohol-producing plants is economically unjustified as well as almost full transferal of production from Siberia and the Far East to the west of Ural. This point of view is based on the traditional - for the Soviet science - raw and consumptive factors of the placement of production. The paper also criticizes the contemporary excise policy of the Russian Federation regarding the alcohol products. This critique is based on the modern foreign experience and the pre-revolutionary Russian one (described by D. I. Mendeleev) regarding the support of local agricultural producers. On the base of field studies we revealed the contemporary paradox of insensitivity of a bottle of vodka's price to the transport cost of its delivery within Russia. Authors believe that necessary reimbursement of escalating costs of delivery of spirit and vodka - as well as excise tax - is one of the factors of illegal sector's emergence in production and trade. The paper reveals an existence of statistical errors in the official estimates of national vodka market. Furthermore, we come to the conclusion about the necessity of urgent decentralization of analytical effort in all industries of the economy and making more empirical studies in the scientific economic laboratories of the universities of all regions of Russia.

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