Peter Oppenheimer’s scientific contributions

Post-crisis Economic Growth in Russia In 2005 Russia experienced a seventh successive year of relatively strong GDP increase, reaching 6.4 per cent. Real incomes rose by an estimated 8.8 per cent and poverty rates declined further. The federal budget ran a record surplus in 2005 of 7.5 per cent of GDP (Table 2.1). The external surplus on trade in goods and services was USD 106 billion (14% of GDP), twenty per cent higher than in 2004. The foreign exchange reserves of the Central Bank of Russia increased by over 40 per cent to USD 182 billion as of 1 January 2006. Total employment was 68.2 million and estimated unemployment decreased to 5.7 million or 7.7 per cent of the workforce. The upswing has been broadly based (Table 2.2). Production of goods in 2004 grew by 6.3 per cent (compared with 8.2 per cent in 2003) and of services by 7.9 per cent (6.9 per cent). Dividing industrial production growth into its natural resource (export oriented) and manufacturing (domestically oriented) components shows the two developing in roughly parallel fashion over the years (Table 2.3 & Figure 2.3). In 2004 the industrial growth leaders were engineering (11.7 per cent), chemicals (7.4 per cent), fuel and energy (7.1 per cent), construction materials (5.3 per cent) and ferrous metallurgy (5.0 per cent) (Figure 2.4).