Abstract. The article explores the interrelation between the main factors of national economy competitiveness on the basis of logical and correlation analysis of the data on 144 countries presented in The Global Competitiveness Report issued by the World Economic Forum. The analysis of the strength and nature of the relations between the factors gives grounds to assume that institutions, infrastructure, higher education and training are core problems; goods market efficiency, technological readiness are key problems; business sophistication and innovation are resulting problems. The analysis shows that the competitiveness indicators of other BRICS countries which are better than Russian ones, are achieved not due to any remarkable progress in economic policy, but owing to the lack of serious failures typical for Russian economy. For instance, the high level of Russian infrastructure, macroeconomic stability, sizes of home market and some other indicators come to nothing because of extremely low level of Russian institutions, market efficiency, financial market, and business sophistication. As a result, other BRICS countries' progress, which is not so remarkable itself, gives much better cumulative result in comparison with Russian breakthrough, which cannot be accomplished in the environment  that is unfavorable for it. With the view of Russian economy competitiveness and innovation upgrade, firstly, it is essential to increase the quality of Russian institutions (the necessity of reforms is indubitable: Russia occupies the 133^d place in the world in accordance with the quality of its institutions), to improve the infrastructure, higher education and training. The advancement in solving these problems will facilitate the situation or solve the large part of the problems of goods market efficiency and improve the existing technological readiness. The increasing of the goods market quality and the improvement of technological readiness will, in their turn, upgrade business sophistication and innovations. The proposed approach gives ground to claim that the reforms need to be made in the sequence described above. The upgrade of Russian companies’ business sophistication and their innovation will be to a great extent the result of the solution of the mentioned problems.