MOSCOW, September 23. /TASS/. Structural crises open up opportunities for introducing technological and institutional innovations, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in his article titled New Reality: Russia and Global Challenges published on Wednesday by the Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily for the Voprosy Ekonomiki (Economic Issues) journal.
"A crisis is always both a threat and an opportunity," Medvedev said explaining that during structural crises there emerges a chance to "qualitatively improve positions on the world’s economic and political map" rather than a danger to "drastically lag behind."
"Breakthroughs ‘from third world to first’ (if we use an expression of (Singapore’s late Prime Minister) Lee Kuan Yew who led Singapore to success) occur, as a rule, in conditions of structural crises when there arises an opportunity to spot innovations and introduce them, provided that innovations are both technological and institutional," the Russian prime minister said.
"It can be proved by practice and experience of the countries that managed to wrench themselves free from economic backwardness - from Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union to Finland, South Korea and Singapore," he said.
Medvedev called on the readers to draw attention to the rise in competition for human resources all around the world, "which becomes the key factor for any country in solution of strategic tasks."
"And even now we can suppose that in the foreseeable future it will reach a new level, for example in solving the problem of quality of machine translation, as removal of language barriers will skyrocket the dynamism of human resources’ movements between countries," he said.
Besides, a growth in inequality is topping the economic and political agenda - "as a factor both affecting the level of social and political stability and possibly restraining economic growth.".