/ world today news/ Drug needle instead of oil and gas!
Nostalgia has always been in fashion in Russia. Before the trees were taller and the grass was greener and the dollar was worth sixty-four cents. And now … now everything is bad. The crises remained unsupported. Capitals are exported from the country. Russia, with its oil and gas needle, cannot yet be detached. The industry is dying. GDP falls. Well, it’s clear who’s to blame. By the way, there is a very selective approach to this “before”. /Russian. ez./
Take, for example, the traditional lamentations about the overall size of the Russian economy. Until 2005-2006, we were often reminded that the Russian Federation’s GDP still did not reach the level of the RSFSR in 1991. They especially liked to cite 1998, when it fell almost twice (57.47%) in relation to the “control”. At the same time, it was quietly forgotten that Russia in the USSR was one of 16 republics that made up a single economic mechanism. For example, the RSFSR did not grow cotton, although it processed it on an industrial scale. Climate-wise, it was much more profitable to grow it in the conditions of Kazakhstan than in Siberia.
Or take the Baltic economic region, which included Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Kaliningrad region. It was home to 3.2% of the Soviet Union’s population, and produced 80% of the Union’s total volume of household electricity meters, 53% of telephones, 30% of passenger mainline cars, 29% of trams, 28% of radios and radiograms, and 14% of tape recorders. After the collapse of the USSR, all of this ended up abroad, and the Russian economy, which had been built as part of the overall economy, was forced to begin a difficult and expensive process of autonomy. As a result, the old mechanisms were no longer working, and the new ones had not yet started. But who of the critics remembers this? The main thing is that the Russian Federation’s GDP fell “half of what it was before the war,” and why and how is no longer important, but the figure was recorded.
However, those old days are gradually covered with the dust of time. Criticizing Yeltsin is no longer interesting. The liberal opposition and the kvass patriots have a new enemy and a new goal. The methods, however, remain the same. For example, it has now become fashionable to lament the destructive consequences of Putin’s fifteen-year rule. There is even an opinion according to which “during the 15 years of Putin’s presidency, the Russian economy was deformed, almost completely lost its sovereignty, became vulnerable to external control, to market conditions.”
As always, the most interesting part is left behind the scenes. Starting with the fact that the active sale of Russian assets to foreign funds was conducted just before the beginning of those “15 years”, and during the specified period the process demonstrated the opposite character, which became especially acute in the last three years. Further, the author of the quote, probably by accident, does not say that despite all its shortcomings and management errors, real and imaginary, the Russian economy, nevertheless, reached the level of 1990 in 2007. In 2009, it was already 111.86%. Even taking into account the crisis decline, it still remained 103.13% in 2009, and began to grow, reaching 112.19% in 2011. According to IMF experts, even taking into account sanctions and other unfavorable factors for Russia, by 2018 the real GDP of the Russian Federation will be equal to approximately 180% of the 1992 level. A very good indicator for an “overly deformed economy.”
By the way, about the oil needle. The most frequent argument of critics of the incorrect structure of the Russian economy is the mention of a single figure: revenue from the sale of oil, oil products and gas is 68.1% of the country’s total export revenue. At the same time, the same critics cite the successful economies of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Norway as an example, despite the fact that the well-being of these countries is entirely based on oil exports. What does “based” mean? It is the share of oil and gas revenues in the country’s total GDP. Angola has the highest share in the world (66%). We will not touch on Libya (54%) and Iraq (47%) – they have other problems now. But we should remember the Saudis (45%), as well as Kuwait (32%), Kazakhstan (27%), Qatar (25%), the UAE (20%), Iran (17%) and Norway (11%). Against this background, only 9% of the “oil” contribution to the Russian Federation’s GDP looks rather pale.
It is noteworthy that by waving only revenue, critics ignore another fact. If we take into account not only what is sold for export, then the total share of fuel and energy minerals in the structure of Russian GDP is about 16%. Not only oil, but also gas, coal, oil shale and generally everything that is used in the energy sector and that can generally be called the “oil and gas” needle. As follows from the figures, the dependence is not so critical. Plus, if we take export revenue, then in 2012 the share of oil and gas revenues in GDP was 9%, and in 2013 – already 8% (including gas – 3%), in 2014 – 7.2%. If this is not a decrease in dependence, then what is?
Maybe we shouldn’t mix green and round? Yes, we sell a lot of oil and gas. Because, firstly, we have these goods, and secondly, they are in high demand on the world market. Why shouldn’t Russia take advantage of these benefits? However, this does not mean that the Russian Federation sells nothing except the world’s gas station. Especially nothing high-tech. Of course, we don’t produce iPhones, but we are world leaders in the construction of nuclear power plants, which are somewhat more complex and technologically advanced than smartphones. At the moment, Rosatom’s export order portfolio has reached $108.3 billion (5.2% of Russia’s GDP in 2014), and net profit from already executed contracts for the same year was $5.2 billion. By the end of 2015, this figure is expected to be at least $6 billion (an increase of 15.38%).
This is where the problem really lies, namely the size of the share of “oil and gas” tax revenues in the country’s budget revenues. In 2011–2013, it was half. True, there has been noticeable progress here too. In 2014, this figure fell slightly to 48%, in 2015 it is expected to decrease to 47%, and the plans for 2016 are already only 43%. It turns out that the government is successfully doing exactly what critics demand of it.
It’s just that the opposition is primarily interested in the process of criticism itself, and not in the actual improvement of the real state of affairs in the country. And the consistency of their criticism is frankly bad. A simple example.
Let’s take two countries, Russia and Norway. Both are oil producers and exporters. If we divide the GDP by the population, there are $66,937 per Norwegian. If we take into account, as stated above, that 11% of Norway’s GDP is formed by oil exports, then the purely oil share is $7,363 per year. A similar calculation for Russia gives $24,805 and $1,786, respectively. Here, critics would do well to determine what particular imbalances in the Russian economy they are so fiercely castigating? Should Russia get off the oil and gas needle, i.e. refuse their export income? Then why aren’t Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Norway criticized for the same thing? By the way, in the KSA the population does not pay any taxes at all.
And if any available income should be used, then Russia should not only not get off this needle, but on the contrary, get on it even harder? After all, for each Russian there is 4.12 times less “oil” money than for each Norwegian! In 2013, a country with a population of 4.6 million people sold oil and natural gas for $330.9 billion, Russia – for a population of 146 million – $173 billion. It looks like the dependence needs to be deepened much more than four times. But the opposition is simultaneously upset by both the fact that “little goes to the people” and the fact that “we are too dependent on oil.”
And this is the case practically everywhere. The opposition sees that the industrial production index of the Russian Federation barely reached 90% of the 1990 level by the end of 2013, but it refuses to see that in 1990 the industry of the RSFSR relied on the now absent industrial complexes of other republics of the single Union. Although, for example, one third of the total industrial power of the USSR went to Ukraine alone. In this sense, the Ukrainian experience is generally indicative. So they decided not to supply ship engines to the “aggressor country”, ship construction stopped at Russian shipyards, which immediately negatively affected the figures for the size of the Russian (!) GDP. But for some reason, the blame for the negativity is placed on Russia.
These same critics do not want to acknowledge the fact that the decline in industrial production in the Russian Federation ended back in 1998, and “over the 15 years of Putin’s presidency” the industrial production index in Russia has grown by 57.89%. Of course, we are not yet able to replace all of the former Soviet industry. But we are moving towards this steadily and successfully. Including thanks to import substitution, which in turn is the result of anti-Russian sanctions. For which the liberals also strongly criticize the country’s leadership.
However, they criticize everything. In the best years (1990), the average life expectancy in the USSR was 69 years (74.2 for women, 64 for men). According to the results of 2014, this figure in the Russian Federation is 70.9 years (76.5 and 65.3, respectively), and the catastrophic decline of 1991-96 was overcome in 2006, since which these figures have been steadily growing in our country. However, in the liberal press, the topic of the inevitable extinction of the Russian population due to monstrous mistakes in the country’s economic policy continues to be very popular.
In general, liberals have some strange nostalgia and there are also serious problems with the logical consistency of criticism. Moreover, the issue here is not in the nostalgia itself or the really existing difficulties. The position of the critics is completely lacking, as they say, a basic starting point and a consistent measuring scale. More precisely, not so. If we break this criticism down into its components, it turns out that it is not some objective problems or real issues that are being criticized. The numbers are simply pulled out to fit a predetermined result, which initially boils down to the classic “you are only to blame for the fact that I want to eat.” Russia is bad for them by definition simply because it is Russia, and not America. Because it is not Obama who leads it. In this regard, I really want to ask these critics: what if Obama leads Russia, will this definitely bring good for Russia?
#real #numbers #inevitable #collapse #Russia
