YEKATERINBURG. April 24 (Interfax) - A period of crisis is a time for considering what will come afterward, not for achieving strategic goals, Yegor Gaidar, the director of the Institute of Economics in the Transition Period, said.

"A crisis is not the best time for resolving strategic goals, because during a crisis we must concentrate on things like exchange rate policy, interest rate policy, budget policy. But a crisis is a time when one must think about what will come afterward," Gaidar said in an address at an economic conference in Yekaterinburg on Friday.

"After the crisis we will be living in a very harsh world," said Gaidar, who was Russia's acting prime minister in 1992.

"Because only those corporations that are able to raise the quality of management, that cut costs, that raise labor productivity will survive. And we will have to compete with them. If we aren't able to compete with them, then it will not be good for us at all," he said.

As for the problem of creating a diversified economy in Russia, Gaidar urged creating conditions so that people invested their own capital, especially in high tech industries.

"For that (investors) must know that no one is coming to take away their business tomorrow, they must be confident in the guarantees of private ownership, the quality of the court system. That is critically important for resolving the problem," he said.