Problems and Methods of Improving the Legal Regulation of Public Investment in Russia

The article describes the main conclusions of the research work aimed at identifying key problems of and ways to improve the legal regulation of public investment in Russia. This work was based on the analysis of legislation and practice of its application. The analysis leads to the conclusion that there are significant shortcomings in the current legislation on planning and implementation of public investment, which hinder their efficiency. Among such shortcomings, the author highlights contradictions on the issue of bodies authorized to make key investment decisions; duplication of the investment component of state programs and national (federal) projects; approval of budget allocations for projects that are not ready for implementation; unclear grounds for raising the price of construction contracts, as well as for centralizing the functions of planning and implementation of sectoral investments, reduction of requirements for justification of investment projects. To mitigate these shortcomings, the author suggests to ensure systematic planning of large investments as part of national and federal projects, excluding these costs from the state programs; as a general rule, to abandon the practice of approving decisions on the implementation of budget investments by individual acts of the government and financing projects without the necessary documentation; to organize a comparative assessment of the efficiency of centralized and sectoral customers in investment management according to legally defined criteria; to return to the use of some previously applied criteria for the efficiency of investment projects.