/ world today news/ The World Bank, a global structure that cannot be called a friend of Russia, publishes data that is close to sensational. By the end of 2022, in the midst of the WTO and the subsequent wave of Western sanctions, our country is in the top five of the largest economies in the world.
The calculation was made according to the gross domestic product (GDP) at purchasing power parity (PPP). The top five economic leaders in the world, according to an updated assessment by the World Bank, are as follows. In first place is China with $31.5 trillion, followed by the United States ($23.1 trillion), followed by India ($15.8 trillion), Japan ($5.6 trillion) and Russia with $5.5 trillion.
It is significant that our country turned out to be the only geographically European country included in the top five. Russia overtook Germany (6th, $5 trillion) and France (10th, $3.5 trillion). Britain did not make the top ten at all.
The Russian economy ignored 14 thousand sanctions
None of our neighbors in the top five apparently experienced the sanctions imposed by their “colleagues”, and even more so in such an amount as Russia, whose economy the “colleagues” planned to “tear to pieces”.
At the very beginning of the WTO, in February-March last year, 2,778 new sanctions were imposed on our country. And only last year, according to rough estimates (for example, according to the pan-Arab television “Al Arabia”), the total number of “punishments” exceeded 14,000.
The World Bank, we add, gives an optimistic forecast for our economy in the medium term – by 2030, a growth of 7.9%, up to 5.943 trillion dollars.
However, it will not be able to keep the fifth line in the rating, predict the bank’s specialists. In fifth place in seven years they ranked the economy of Indonesia, which in the current ranking is in seventh position ($4.811 trillion). However, a prediction is ultimately a prediction and there is no telling if it will come true.
Another thing is the actually achieved indicators.
And here comes the question of how life-affirming indicators correlate with the true state of affairs in our economy. For the average citizen, “GDP by PPP” remains quite abstract concepts.
Samun as a starting point
The PPP indicator used by the World Bank specialists is the adjustment of the exchange rate to the level of domestic prices for an adequate comparison of different economies, Valery Emelyanov, an expert on the stock market, explained in a comment for “Regnum”. “After all, a dollar in Switzerland and a dollar in India have very different purchasing power,” he notes.
Relatively speaking, PPP measures countries’ gross domestic product not in money, but in the most demanded consumer goods, such as bread or servings of rice.
“That is, they take a certain standard basket of goods and measure each country separately,” says the expert.
And then they are converted into conventional dollars – multiplied by the price of a loaf of bread or a bowl of rice in a reference country, most often the United States.
Therefore, the GDP of the USA, as Emelyanov explains, is always the same both in parity and in nominal terms – about 26 trillion dollars. “And other countries, like China, have very different GDP depending on the price adjustment – either 19 trillion or 33 trillion,” he says.
Russia, by the standards of the largest Western economies, is a country with relatively low prices, the expert notes.
“And this can also be interpreted as an economy on a larger scale than can be assessed simply by GDP in rubles,” he explains. “The purchasing power of the ruble in Russia is higher than the purchasing power of an equal share of the dollar, for example. Therefore, in terms of purchasing power parity, the Russian economy turns out to be larger than could be determined simply by GDP,” adds the expert.
The basis for the “beautiful transformation”
Russia’s place in the World Bank’s updated ranking can be called a “miraculous transformation,” says Vasily Koltashov, head of the Center for Political Economic Research at the Institute for a New Society. Although formally the Russian economy only maintained its previous positions, such an assessment in the conditions of the economic war actually declared by the “collective West” can be considered an exceptional compliment.
The expert draws attention to another, in his opinion, important aspect.
“Soviet modernization of the economy was not in vain, its results were not completely lost, as it seemed to many,” commented Koltashov. “And in the last 25 years, the Russian economy has been developing and growing,” he adds.
In the future, according to Koltashov, the Russian economy will also develop based on the expansion of the manufacturing industry and the implementation of large infrastructure projects. The economist also points to the territorial expansion of the country, whose potential, according to him, is far from exhausted.
We previously reported that industrial production in Russia in the first half of 2023, according to the Ministry of Economic Development, increased by 2.6% compared to the first half of 2022.
In June, industrial production also grew by 6.5%. The level of two years ago was exceeded by 3.8%. At the same time, the growth of industry in January-June compared to the same period last year amounted to 6.2%, which, as President Vladimir Putin said, was a good result.
The United States has acknowledged that the Russian economy has withstood Western sanctions and shown great strength. Thus, the Wall Street Journal noted: Western countries felt a failure in their desire to “quickly bring the Russian economy to its knees,” which is “identical to a stalemate on the battlefield.”
In particular, they continue to buy Russian oil, despite the restrictions imposed, and the production of Russian raw materials has decreased slightly. In addition, Russia, according to the publication, has managed to solve the problems that initially arose with the import of microchips “and now has the ability to strike daily with precision weapons.”
Experts have previously noted that the German economy will lose its leadership in the EU, including because of Berlin’s refusal to purchase Russian energy resources.
It is not known to what extent the predictions of the experts will come true, regardless of whether they are Russian energy experts or foreign banking analysts.
But it is now safe to say that Russia’s fifth place in the ranking of the largest economies at the end of 2022, albeit at purchasing power parity, is clearly not what the anti-Russian camp, led by the United States, wanted when he introduced one restriction after another against the Russian economy until their number exceeded 14 thousand.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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