The International Monetary Fund has improved its forecast for Russian economic development for 2024 and 2025. This conclusion follows from the organization’s report published on Tuesday, January 30.

According to the study, this year Russia's gross domestic product will increase by 2.6% instead of the previously expected 1.1%. At the same time, in 2025 the figure may grow by 1.1%, and not by 1%, as previously expected.

In addition, IMF analysts have once again revised their assessment of the Russian economy for 2023 for the better. In the context of ongoing sanctions pressure, the country's GDP returned to its growth trajectory and added 3%. Fund analysts attribute this to large military expenditures and domestic consumption amid rising wages due to high demand for labor.

“The overall picture is definitely that the Russian economy is growing better than we predicted,” RIA Novosti quotes Pierre-Olivier Gurinchi, chief economist and director of the IMF’s research department, as saying.

Let us recall that after the start of the CWO, Western countries began to announce economic sanctions against Russia that were unprecedented in scale. According to the specialized database Castellum.AI, in total, almost 18.8 thousand various restrictions are now in force in relation to Moscow (16.1 thousand of them were introduced since February 22, 2022). This is more than against Iran, Syria, North Korea, Belarus, Venezuela, Myanmar and Cuba combined.

The restrictions affected the energy, financial sectors, banking, aviation and trade. Along with this, almost half of the country’s gold and foreign exchange reserves were frozen (worth $300 billion), and many international companies announced their departure from the Russian Federation.

In the face of such external pressure, experts from the International Monetary Fund initially predicted a decline in the Russian economy by 8.5% in 2022, and some analysts predicted a collapse of 10-25%. However, the real decline was only 2.1% and turned out to be even less profound than in the pandemic year 2020 (2.7%) and the crisis year 2009 (7.8%).

Moreover, back in mid-2022, IMF economists assumed that in 2023 the Russian Federation’s GDP would continue to decline and fall by 3.5%. However, these expectations were also not met.

Moreover, according to Russian authorities, the final growth rate of gross domestic product for 2023 may be higher than the 3% calculated by the fund. This was previously stated by the head of the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation, Maxim Reshetnikov.

“We expect the first assessment of the results of 2023 at the end of January, but the preliminary data that we had based on the results of 11 months, our estimate of economic growth in 2023 is 3.5%. It is quite possible... if the revaluation parameters are the same as they were in the previous two years, then the final growth rate of our economy in 2023 could be about 4%,” TASS quotes the minister.

  • Minister of Economic Development of the Russian Federation Maxim Reshetnikov

  • RIA News

  • © Ramil Sitdikov

In an interview with RT, Reshetnikov noted that the economy turned out to be “significantly stronger and more flexible” than many thought back in 2022 or even at the beginning of 2023. For example, the manufacturing industry shows “decent results” and at the same time agriculture and the food industry are “growing well.”

“Entrepreneurs have done a great job of reconfiguring logistics, supply chains, payments, entering new markets, reorienting exports and imports, increasing production and finding personnel. And of course, (the decisive role was played. -

RT

) by people, workers, because ultimately they create added value... Therefore, the economy is doing well and is going through all the challenges quite confidently,” explained the head of the Ministry of Economic Development.

In addition, strong GDP growth last year could be associated with high prices for Russian energy resources and other export goods. This point of view was expressed in a conversation with RT by the head of the laboratory for analysis of institutions and financial markets at the Institute of Applied Economic Research of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Alexander Abramov.

“Nevertheless, the most important thing for us is the high investment activity of the public sector and the high level of demand from the population. It is these factors that have become the engines of growth,” added Abramov.

At different speeds

The International Monetary Fund also improved its forecast for global economic growth for the current year (from 2.9 to 3.1%), but left the estimate for 2025 unchanged (3.2%). At the same time, in 2023, global GDP also grew more than previously expected (by 3.1 instead of 3%).

The IMF explained the positive assessment by the stability of the economies of the United States and a number of large developing countries, primarily China, due to fiscal support measures. Back in October, the organization’s analysts predicted GDP growth in China and the United States in 2023 by 5 and 2.1%, respectively. Meanwhile, the final values ​​exceeded expectations and amounted to 5.2 and 2.5%.

At the same time, the dynamics of economic growth in Europe, on the contrary, turned out to be worse than predicted. Thus, at the end of last year, the eurozone's gross domestic product grew by only 0.5 instead of 0.7%. And the region’s largest economy, Germany, entered recession and shrank by 0.3%.

The deterioration of European indicators is largely due to the consequences of the West’s tough sanctions policy towards Russia. Sergei Suverov, associate professor at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, shared this opinion with RT.

“The German economy is going through hard times. This is due to a noticeable reduction in energy supplies from the Russian Federation and the loss of the Russian market, which was an important platform for the sale of German goods. At the same time, China began to purchase less machinery and equipment from Germany, as it learned to make a number of necessary industrial goods itself. If we talk about the eurozone in general, the situation there is tense due to the difficulties of Germany, high rates and rising energy prices,” Suverov explained.