626 ISSN 1075-7007, Studies on Russian Economic Development, 2019, Vol. 30, No. 6, pp. 626–634. © Pleiades Publishing, Ltd., 2019. Russian Text © The Author(s), 2019. Integrating Russia into the global proj ect of digital transformation: opportunites, problem and risks N. A. Ganichev a, * and O. B. Koshovets b a Institute of Economic Forecasting, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia b Institute of Economics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia *e-mail: nickgan@yandex.ru Received March 21, 2019; revised April 18, 2019; accepted May 7, 2019 Abstract—Can the global development of the digital economy restart global economic growth? Will the pro gram for the development of the digital economy in the Russian Federation be able to stimulate the com- petitiveness of Russia’s economy? This paper shows that despite widespread declarations the development of the digital economy is not a new way for stimulating high growth rates of the world economy. At the global level, two different models of the development of the digital economy are actually implemented: one for developed countries and the other for developing ones. The digital economy development model offered to developing countries by international structures potentially leads to the loss of technological sovereignty and consolidation of the long-term status of “technological periphery.” The Russian digital economy devel- opment program is analyzed, which ignores several extremely important aspects of the implementation of international projects in the field of digitalization, and the measures outlined in the program may not fully meet the stated goals, at least in terms of maintaining technological independence. DOI: 10.1134/S1075700719060030 In recent years, digitalization has become a new global trend of technological and economic develop- ment: programs for the development of the digital economy (DE) have been adopted in many countries around the world, including the Russian Federation. In addition, this topic has received widespread support at the international level, from the G-20 summits and the World Economic Forum in Davos to such interna- tional development institutions as the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Now this global technological project is progressing as a new paradigm for accelerating global economic growth. But can the global de- velopment of DE “restart” global economic growth? Digital economy: A new industrial revolution or a global lobbying project? In Western literature and ana- lytical reports on the DE, “digital transformation” and its related areas of technological change are considered as objective processes that are a natural result of the development and deepening of technological progress and are often presented in terms of a new technological revolution, a change of development paradigm [1]. Thus, K. Schwab, drawing an analogy with the industrial revolutions of the past, uses the concept of the “fourth industrial revolution” [2]. Meanwhile, the concept of the “third industrial revo- lution” has only recently been advanced [3], along with the green industrial revolution and the nanotech- nological industrial revolution (from the late 1990s to the early 2000s) [4]. It should be noted that such ideas about techno- logical revolutions and shifts intentionally ignore the institutional aspect of technological development. In reality, a change in the leading technological struc- tures, “clusters,” and “paradigms” substantially appears to be a process of competition among economic insti- tutions. The tremendous capital intensity of any new breakthrough technologies, and even more large-scale transformation of whole areas based on those technolo- gies, requires an active search for additional financial resources, therefore, cohesive lobbying with a view to becoming a dominant trend and gaining support from the public sector, big business, stock markets, and so on [5]. The global project of digitalization of the econo- my is also the result of cohesive lobbying: it became a kind of response to the global financial and economic crisis of 2007–2009 and has been discussed since 2009 [6]. The final document of the Economic Forum in Davos for 2009 states that the “digital revolution” will not only become a reliable means of overcoming the global financial crisis but also “can become the basis for the subsequent sustainable development of the global economy” [7, p. 1]. In the late 1990s, it was the telecommunications sector that became the main object of financial capital, which triggered a boom in this industry due to financial speculation, which was supported by huge amounts of venture capital and manifested in high levels of valuation of ICT compa- nies. Thus, in the period from 1997 to 2000, shares of tech- ECONOMIC POLICY