Page 15 - RusRPTApr23

the GDP had contracted by 2.5% from a year ago,” BOFIT said. “Back in November,
the central bank predicted that the economy would contract by 3.3%, and the average of international investment banks' forecasts for Russia was -4.2%.”
The first estimate of y/y changes is
usually not consistent with quarterly statistics, BOFIT says, “so an accurate picture of the last quarter's growth is not yet available.” In the past Rosstat has made major revisions to the GDP result after it has dug more deeply into the data.
And it has been accused of massaging the data to throw Russia’s economic performance into a more favourable light. However, despite the occasional anomalies, economists on the whole trust Rosstat’s data as largely accurate.
“The data will certainly still be
clarified, but based on the figures published now, the contraction of the economy would have stopped already in early autumn,” BOFIT said.
BOFIT is treating the results with
caution. In addition to the growth spurt at the end of the year, Rosstat's
first assessment of the development of items in the supply balance (i.e. the total supply and demand of the economy) is difficult to interpret, says BOFIT, partly due to the fact that the Russian government stopped publishing a lot of key data, such as trade and banking sector results, immediately after the start of the war.
“Estimates of the amount of total
export and import are not published, but based on other items, the amount of net export last year would have been around zero,” says BOFIT. “This again does
not fit well with the available data on the development of the value of foreign trade.”
Economists have been forced to look
at the publicly available customs data of Russia’s partner countries in order to work out what is happening to Russia’s trade.
Based on this data, the preliminary
balance of payments data suggests that the value of total imports decreased by
9% and the value of total exports increased by 14% from a year ago, BOFIT reports. The value of Russia's goods imports calculated from mirror statistics decreased by 23% and the value of goods exports increased by 23% compared to the
previous year.
Rosstat’s data also paints a mixed
picture on consumption, which has not fallen as far as might be expected given the size of the economic shock caused by the imposition of a “massive package”
of sanctions immediately after the war in Ukraine started.
15 RUSSIA Country Report Russia April 2023 www.intellinews.com