Russia: Overcoming the Effects of Economic Crisis Takes Time
The last year's decline of Gross Domestic Product in Russia was harder than in most big economies of the world. The financial crisis has revealed specific circumstances of growth in Russia: The situation deteriorated not only by the downfall of crude oil prices, but especially by the Russian banking sector not being able to satisfy financing demand of the private sector enterprises. So foreign liabilities of enterprises had increased and the dependence of the enterprises on the international financial markets had strengthened. In that way impacts of the global financial crisis affected Russia harder. Although external conditions for the Russian economy improved in the last months due to the rise of world oil prices and global demand for commodities, domestic demand still suffers from small revenues and bad financing conditions for enterprises. Because of its structural weakness it will take Russia longer than other transformation countries to overcome the crisis. Economic growth in the near future will expand much smaller than on last years’ average.
