Effect of the State Policy of Shipbuilding Development on Sea Freight

In the 2000s, the federal authorities, realizing the importance and significance of the shipbuilding industry, its effect on the economy, took a whole range of measures for prospective development of the industry that shall meet the needs of the national economy in cargo shipping. The purpose of the paper is to determine the effect of measures of state shipbuilding support on the volume of sea and inland water cargo shipping. To achieve this goal, the paper provides a comparative analysis of the development of the transport system of Russia as a whole and its individual structural components based on the official statistics. The obtained results are rechecked using linear and nonlinear second-order polynomial models. As a result of the study, it was found the absence of statistically significant patterns that reflect the increase in cargo shipping by sea and inland water transport. Consequently, the increase in government support for shipbuilding and the active development of the seaports infrastructure have not significantly effected on cargo shipping yet. At that time, the negative trend of reduction in sea freight traffic was overcome in 2017 that should be considered as a positive point, indicating the presence of certain prerequisites for subsequent growth. Keywords—industry, shipbuilding, maritime transport, seaports, infrastructure