On new approaches in tariff regulation and specifics of digital economy

Among new tools Deputy Head of FAS Anatoly Golomolzin highlighted participation of Consumer Councils in FAS Board meetings and launching a long-term tariff policy.

Deputy Head of FAStalked about the issue on 20 April 2017 at the Round Table from the “Dialogue with authorities” cycle organized by the Corporate Counsel Association.

According to him, FAS Methodological Council on Tariff Regulation and the Exchange Committee facilitate well-balanced tariff decisions. FAS is also analyzing tariff regulatory acts and the necessary amendments are being made.

Among the areas of FAS work in the field of tariff regulation, Anatoly Golomolzin highlighted rejecting the “costs plus” principle and moving to market indicators through the “inflation minus” principle. Decision on introducing, changing, terminating regulations are made on the basis of market analysis. State-by-stage tariff rebalancing is performed using market indicators comparable with the regulated and adjacent goods markets.

Anatoly Golomolzinpointed out that sustainability of the government tariff policy is supported by employing the tariff regulation experience in transport and communications previously accumulated by the Ministry of Antimonopoly Policy of Russia as well as the experience of FAS representatives participating in FAS Board and in the Boards of the Regional Energy Commissions. “Efficiency of our tariff policy is enhanced by the synergy of FAS competences and experience in tariff regulation, antimonopoly and procurement control”, underlined Deputy Head of FAS. “Traditional FAS practices of providing access to information for all interested persons are being extrapolated to tariff decision-making procedures; the common information space at the federal and regional levels is under formation”.

“The modern approaches to tariff regulation enable to not only encourage development of market relations but also solve current issues, which include cross-subsidies and discriminatory pricing”, said the speaker.

Then he covered the issue of digitalization of the economy, pointing out that “changes in goods circulation related to introduction of information-and-communications technologies (ICT) have transformed the existing markets and created the new ones where useful value is generated through collecting, processing and providing information, including telemetric data”.

The value of collecting, processing and visualizing information determined the emergence of a new market player – aggregates (markets of wholesale and retail trade, insurance, education, transport, tourist services, etc.), and the same person frequently acts as an “aggregator” on different markets. According to Deputy Head of FAS, “the antimonopoly bodies undertake efforts to ensure that price indicators formed on such platforms are objective”.

Typical features of digital economy are a broad use of e-platforms, big data, big analytics, and digital algorithms.

E-technologies undoubtedly bring benefits to the economy; at the same time, under digitalization of the economy, like never before, it is essential to support competition on important, high-priority markets in conjunction with ICT development.

“Understanding the global and objective nature of progressive digitalization, a system-wide policy should be built up that will facilitate development of competition on the markets and strengthen competitive ability of the economy”, emphasized Anatoly Golomolzin.

He outlined the main development areas as follows: harmonizing the law and normative-and-technical documentation on ICT; shaping the common information space – electronic confidence space; maintaining information security.

“The antimonopoly bodies simultaneously are improving the practice of their own work. We know how to expose and suppress large-scale violations in the field of new digital technologies. It concern operations of global players on the world markets as well as new forms of violations, particularly, suppressing bid-rigging collusions on electronic trading sites”, summed up Anatoly Golomolzin.