The existing practice of state planning not only providing a reasonable decision making aimed at the achievement of strategic goals of the country development, but also does not consider any reasonable and scientific procedure of decisions support. Currently, the regulation of the decision making procedure contents is replaced by the formalization of document control planning procedures.
At the moment the necessity of strategic, including medium-term and long-term planning of social and economic development of the country is acutely experienced at all management levels – federal, regional, local. The attempts for implementation of goal-oriented planning and medium-term budget planning are recently made at the federal level, “national projects” are being promoted. Most big cities elaborate strategic development plans. However all these useful measures don’t have any serious theoretical substantiation, generally accepted procedural guidelines and are not coordinated with each other.
It should be noted that it’s been a long time as planning is recognized in the international practice as a complex social process that is way beyond the scope of the economics subject field. The understanding of this fact by society is an independent problem that can be solved by planning experts acting jointly with other experts and civil society representatives. Other vital task, facing experts of this field is mediation in assimilation of planning technique by economists. The problem is that the possibilities of scheduling and network goal-oriented planning techniques have not been assimilated yet. Therefore a priority should be given to planning methodology development, considering influence of all the factors, significant for the life of the country, major active forces and their objectives, using a scenario approach and able to find out the optimal way to achieve the most favorable future.
One of the most elaborated and most popular approaches to the research of complex multilevel systems is an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)1. It is successfully used by dealing with management problems in various fields of human activities, including the field of state planning.
The generation of the state planning scheme begins with the developments of the long-range forecasting technique, whereby should be considered the influence of all key factors on social and economic development of the country, such as economic, political, social, technological, ecological and other factors, revealing not only internal but also external limits. There are not only quantitative figures, but also actors, events, conditions and their risks, policies, strategies and other factors. One of the main advantages of the proposed scheme is the major forces (actors) having influence on these factors and accordingly on the future of the country. Both governmental authorities (federal and regional) and society as a whole, large business, foreign countries, international organizations, other significant participants of economic and political processes can be considered as the actors. The development of the country depends on the objectives and policies within the context of achievement of these actors objectives, which are the basis for the consideration of the country developments scenarios. The actors activity is oriented on the implementation of these scenarios. Combination of the developed scenarios, containing main macrocharacteristics of the development level (e.g. number of population, GDP per capita, actual household disposable income and others), depending on the priority grade of each of them enables to calculate a generalized forecasting scenario, representing an implementation of the contrast scenarios.
Finally, only one of possible scenarios can be implemented and it will be a combination of various actors attempts to form it in such a way that its own interests will be met. Many (often controversial) interests, implemented under this scenario can result in the «weakened version» of what each actor intends to observe as an outcome. This forecasting process is called a direct planning process or exploratory forecast. In consequence of the first forecast iteration consideration one or several actors can start working on changing some of their policies, in order to attempt to carry out a new outcome, which is closer to a desirable outcome (this procedure is called a reversed process or normative forecast). Eventually, particular model and/or scheme changes are usually carried out after forming the first version of the forecasting model (it is clear that the model is also changing then). Such iteration is usually repeated several times. The scheme and model of the reverse process can be updated simultaneously. Iterations of this sort can differ greatly and model updating requires a certain analytical culture.
This approach means that next stage will require forming a specific algorithmic procedure and methods of binding scenario conditions, forecasts, target programs and other elements of social and economic development of Russian economy, based on this procedure. This working stage will require making graph fragments, preparing relevant inquiry forms, canvasing specially selected experts, process and interpreting results.