Way out of economic morass: Chamber’s of Commerce receipt

By Vestnik Kavkaza

On Tuesday Vladimir Putin conducted a session devoted to economic issues. The mass media called the meeting “secret,” as no information about it was shown on the Kremlin website, except for a list of participants. However, the list means a lot: Dmitry Medvedev, his deputy Igor Shuvalov, the head of the presidential Administration Sergei Ivanov, the presidential aide Andrei Belousov, ministers of Finances and Economic Development Anton Siluanov and Alexei Ulyukayev, the head of the CB Elvira Nabiulina, and the former head of the Ministry of Finances Alexei Kudrin are all listed.

The mass media has predicted that the reason for the meeting is a forecast on technical recession in the second and third quarters by the Ministry of Finances. In the first quarter the GDP growth was 0.8%, and the ministry doesn’t exclude that in the future the index “will reduce to zero or lower.” The majority of experts don’t expect anything good from 2014 for the Russian economy. Earlier the Minister of Finances Anton Siluanov stated that in 2014 the growth of Russian GDP could be on the level of 0-0.5%. According to him, the conditions in which the country will have to work in 2014 will be the most difficult since 2008-2009.

However, the vice-president of the Chamber of Commerce, Georgy Petrov, thinks this is not a disaster: “The essence of Russia’s development is the concentration of power in the center and economic independence in regions. If we follow this way, the Russian economy will overcome the current difficult period. We haven’t faced such a difficult period in our modern history yet. A crisis is a more favorable situation – a drop is always replaced by a rise, while we got into confusion.”

According to Petrov, the way out of the confusion is to encourage the demand in foreign and internal markets: “It is difficult to do in our conditions. We are not China, we do not have 1.3 billion consumers, when everybody pays $100 and no export is needed. However, even China can’t live without it. Our market is much smaller. There are many other complicated questions. We live in the context of the Customs Union and have to consider interests of our partners in Kazakhstan and Belarus. Sometimes our economic interests contradict each other.” At the same time united efforts give new opportunities, as we belong to one market.