Page 41 - RusRPTNov22

3.1 Macroeconomic overview
The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) released its latest macroeconomic survey of professional economists’ forecasts and its own estimates on October 20.
The survey is the regulator’s best guess at where the economy is going, and is bolstered by polling a select group of leading independent economists' views.
“The ranges of analysts’ forecasts for most indicators have continued to narrow (see shaded areas in the charts). However, the ranges for nominal wages, the unemployment rate, the exchange rate, exports and imports remain wide over the entire forecast horizon,” the CBR said.
The latest outlook is relatively upbeat and continues the trend of improving outlook from the previous macroeconomic survey in September. At the start of the war economists were predicting an economic contraction of between 8% and 15%, but that has been constantly improved as the war wears on and the CBR is now predicting a contraction of 3.5%, but with the caveat it could be a slightly worse contraction of 4.2% in its more pessimistic scenario.
“Analysts have improved the GDP forecast for 2022 from -4.2% to -3.5%, while lowering forecasts for 2023 from -1.8% to -2.1% and for 2024 from 1.7% to 1.5%,” the CBR said. “Median GDP growth expectations for 2024 are back to July values. The GDP forecast for 2025 was raised slightly by 0.1 pp to 1.7%. This means that, according to analysts, GDP in 2025 will be 2.5% lower than in 2021 (-2.8% in the September survey). The long-term GDP growth estimate is unchanged at 1.5%.”
41 RUSSIA Country Report November 2022 www.intellinews.com