Structural Alternatives to Ensuring Technological Sovereignty: the Case of the Oil Refining Catalyst Industry Market

The article is devoted to the analysis of the processes currently taking place in the sphere of production of catalysts for oil refining in the context of solving the problem of ensuring technological sovereignty in the oil industry of Russia. The relevance of the study is associated, on the one hand, with the significance of this industry for ensuring the economic security of the country and the importance in this regard of analyzing the processes and results of state policy in this area, and, on the other hand, with the existing gap in the research of such problems, in particular in the field of application of institutional analysis tools for the study of industry markets. The purpose of the article is to identify the optimal structural alternative for organizing the catalyst production market to solve the problem of technological sovereignty in this area with minimal costs for the state and market participants. To achieve the goal of the article, a comparative analysis of structural alternatives for organizing the domestic market for the production of catalysts for oil refining is used. The result of the study is that the optimal structural alternative for organizing this market is an oligopoly with vertical integration of catalyst manufacturers into several major vertically integrated oil companies with competition between them across the entire range of catalysts supported by the state, since this, on the one hand, allows avoiding the problem of "extortion" arising from the situation of a state monopoly or vertical integration of catalyst manufacturers into one vertically integrated oil company, and, on the other hand, it allows reducing losses from excessive competition and reducing the total industry costs for R & D in this area that arise with oligopolistic competition without vertical integration of catalyst manufacturers into vertically integrated oil companies. The following research methods are used in the study: institutional analysis, statistical method and stakeholder analysis. The main result of the study is to identify the optimal organization of the industry market from the standpoint of ensuring technological sovereignty and to characterize the features of the Russian oil refining catalyst market and elements of its institutional structure.