Interesting. This supports Perry Anderson's thesis in a recent London Review of Books survey that I liked and Chris Doss hated, that Russia's current relative prosperity is relative, basically a matter of having come from a place where it had nowhere to go but up, and that Russia has become converted from an industrial power in a platform for raw material exports. In terms of capital development, Russia has been flat for a decade, with _no_ improvement over the depths of '98, although of course living standards are much improved. Without actually controlling for lots of things I don't know anything about, and it would take a proper multivariate regression analysis to do it, it looks like a good stating hypothesis is that _all_ of the improvement in Russian living standards (and accordingly in large part Putin's vast popularity) is due to the dramatic increase in the price of oil over the last decade. Which portends poorly for Russia in the long run, unless the Peak Oil people are right, maybe.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On May 8, 2007, at 7:20 PM, Dennis Redmond wrote:
>
> > Hmm, I was trolling for stats the other day, and
> if memory serves
> > aright,
> > Russian investment is up from 11% GDP in 2000 to
> 19% today.
>
> It looks like the 1990s saw the Yeltsin collapse,
> which has been
> enormously aided by the strength in oil since 1998
> (which was the
> year of the Russian crisis, right?).
>
> Here's what the World Bank says:
>
> Gross fixed capital formation (% of GDP)
> 1990 32
> 1991 29
> 1992 23
> 1993 24
> 1994 20
> 1995 22
> 1996 21
> 1997 20
> 1998 18
> 1999 16
> 2000 14
> 2001 17
> 2002 19
> 2003 18
> 2004 18
> 2005 18
> 2006 18
>
> Here's the oil price for comparison (WTI,
> US$/barrel):
>
> 1990 23.73
> 1991 20.00
> 1992 19.32
> 1993 16.97
> 1994 15.82
> 1995 17.02
> 1996 20.67
> 1997 19.09
> 1998 12.72
> 1999 17.97
> 2000 28.50
> 2001 24.44
> 2002 25.02
> 2003 28.83
> 2004 41.44
> 2005 56.53
> 2006 66.00
>
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