Short Note: Russian Economic Power
I see Simplicius has a paid article on Russia’s economy that I can’t directly comment upon thus this short note. Russian economic power isn’t recorded in rubles and kopeks or GDP/PPP. Russian economic power is shown by what it’s able and what it plans to accomplish. And that doesn’t include what Russian companies do outside of Russia. Look at Rosatom for example.
Those readers that have read my Russian economic/development articles since November of last year—and there’re several dozen—have a real good handle on Russian economic power and what it’s going to do with that power and for who’s benefit. One of the more important articles is Russia’s 2030-2036 development goals, which was delivered 5 weeks after Putin’s major Leap Day Address that continues to be cited. And of course, let’s not omit Putin’s hour long SPIEF speech on how Russia will employ its economic power.
My point is to understand just how much economic power Russia has at its commend, one must have closely followed what was done in the year or so prior to this year’s spate of announcements just before and after the election. PPP doesn’t build what Russia has planned; raw economic power does which includes the investment prowess to make it happen.
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Simplicius also notes that Russian Grey Economy is not accounted in the statistics. 😎
Another way of accounting for the power of Russia's economy is to include a assessment on the amount of GDP support it's resources allow in countries that receive and benefit from Russia's exports. ( This could obviously extend to all raw material export nations and as such provide an alternative metric for economic ranking which would particularly accentuate the positive contribution countries with lower nominal GDP, according to standard calc, yet strong raw materials exports actually engender.) Think Mali and uranium suppliesto France and all the economic benefits that are facilitated in France, or the competitive pricing of the formerly consistent and reliable provision of russian gas to germany.
Much of hese massive economic benefits to the importer could also be included in such an extended metric of the exporters economic power and should be standard additional metric.
Of course importing countries, the world bank and inf etc implicitly know this hence the tendency for imposition of debt trap and policy favourable to wealth extraction .
To have a positive league table of resource exporters and a composite metric with GDP would give a sense of how much economic support the raw materials exporting countries actually provide to the " richer" nations and their dependence on the resource exporting nations.