>Chris Doss wrote:
>
>> What would you recommend if you were the Kremlin's
>> economic advisor? I mean this question seriously.
>
>Clone Finland's industrial policies. Reason: it was a northern
>resource-based economy, which no mainstream economist ever thought would
>amount to anything. But Finland upscaled from forestry into cellphones and
>the rest is euro-history. Russia could do the same.
Finland is a small country that can do nicely exporting high-value-added products (though cell phones are getting pretty commodified now, and Nokia's falling behind on the cool factor). Russia is a huge country, with 27 times the pop of Finland, that would have to generate a large internal market; its exports are now mostly natural resources. It could never export high-VA stuff on a scale comparable to Finland. Russia exported $1,059 per capita in 2003; Finland, $11,590. Scaling Russia up to the Finnish rate of per capita exports would mean that Russia would have to export $1.7 trillion, 18% of current world exports. Kinda hard.
Doug