Russian Economist Konstantin Sonin explains what a recent report on the Russian economy – which argues that “Putinomics” can both keep the war going and ensure economic growth – gets wrong.
Konstantin Sonin: […] here are a number of artificial statistical effects that create the impression that the economy as a whole is growing. The fact is that it is not growing. In fact, two processes are taking place in the economy: a decline in people’s standard of living and a decline in consumption – in both the quantity of goods consumed and the quality of goods consumed. This is how the war is being financed […] We get a statistical illusion.
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If we take all these [official statistical] figures on faith, then we get something strange: you can take a working economy, remove a million people from the workforce – 500,000 for the war, 500,000 as emigrants – increase the costs of all transactions – because, owing to the chain of intermediaries, each transaction abroad now costs more and gets you less – and the end result is an economy producing more.
This contradicts what we know about the functioning of an economy. There is no such thing as pressing a button and producing more. Especially if your costs have increased. You can also imagine a situation where you press a button and produce more now at the expense of tomorrow, but my colleagues do not expect a downturn tomorrow.
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I do not think that the people sitting at [Russia’s federal statistics agency] Rosstat are deliberately tweaking the numbers. But it would not be surprising if you, presented with the opportunity to decide, roughly speaking, how to calibrate a model, you did it in such a way that it gave you the most favorable numbers.
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If we roughly assume that inflation [which is officially at around 9 percent year on year at the moment] is actually underestimated by about half, then GDP growth disappears, as does the growth of real incomes […] obviously does not exist. Because if this growth were real, we would have no idea where these real incomes are going, as there is no consumption growth in any data.
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Of course, the Russian economy has not collapsed, as some hotheads predicted; it has not gone away. But for each transaction, for each item, the costs have gone up. Every unit of Russian exports is sold for less than it was sold for before. Every unit of Russian imports is bought for more than it was bought for before.
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The effects we are talking about, which I believe indicate an economic deterioration, are a couple percent, single percentage points. Maybe even 10%. We have seen that GDP and other macroeconomic aggregates can halve in seven years – this was the case in the early 1990s. But did trams stop running? Did clinics stop working?
In other words, this alone does not lead to an economic collapse. […] There is a war going on now and that it is being financed by reducing the country’s standard of living. We know from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s that people can put up with a lot for a long time. Before my eyes, from the age of 10 to 18, we went from queues for quality products to queues for butter, and then to queues for eggs and bread.
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I do not think it’s possible to assist the brain drain more than it has already been assisted […] Russia has experienced a brain drain that is unprecedented for any country in the last half century.
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Regarding capital flight, we also need to understand what it means to “encourage capital flight." […] Dollars only make sense if our oligarch bought some goods abroad and brought them to Russia. In this case, the dollars are put to work. And what would our hypothetical oligarch invest in if he were allowed to? In the most profitable business today: circumventing sanctions. This is where the biggest margins are now. Allowing Putin’s oligarchs to invest money abroad now, allowing capital flight, would amount to subsidizing the most profitable business out there.
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If Putin today decisively carries out demilitarization and reduces spending on the security services and propaganda, then yes, he can prolong the life of his regime. But if, for example, next year he increases military spending and increases spending on the security services and propaganda, then he might bring it all down in a year.
Russians don’t commonly love Putin, but consider themselves powerless to make a change now that protest leaders are all assassinated and even the mildest form of dissent is immediately met with police brutality. Many also don’t see the alternative and are scared that end of Putin’s reign will induce separatism and end of Russia - which is a talking point commonly brought up.
Although placing countless sanctions and international intervention tanking the Russian economy doesn’t help Russians to love the West, either, as it is regular people, including anti-war and anti-Putin folks, that struggle, not the ruling elite.
Source: spending a lot of time in Russia
Maybe it is time to accept that if your empire only exist while old genocidal fuck lives it would be benefical to everyone involved, including people that live on the lands claimed by so called russia, to accept that it shouldn’t exist as it is now. As for not loving putin and sAnCtIoNS and powerlessness, hundreds of thousands of russians have of their own free will chose to sign a contract with army to go and die in Ukraine and not to go and depose their not loved putin.
If you ask me, countries should not exist to begin with - but you’re not arguing with me here. For plenty of Russians, losing their country is a big fear, and if you add up immense uncertainty that comes with it, I kinda begin to see what they’re afraid of.
If you consider the geography of contracted soldiers, they primarily come from poor regions and have exactly one motivation to fight - money. For those regions, the money people get for serving 1 year is lifechanging, worth over a decade of work. And with desperate conditions many find themselves in, some take an offer. From that perspective, sanctioning the country in the way it is conducted now may actually exacerbate the issue even further.
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Well, despising people and thinking of them as a monogamous group based on nationality is neither rational nor positive. Plenty of Russians are against this war, and whatever is currently done only serves to empower those who benefit from it.
I have relatives in Ukraine, Dnipro to be exact, and they were under rocket strikes. I feel afraid for them, and I would love to stop everyone who enters the battlefield - and have no mercy for those going there by their own will.
But I also understand that blatant hatred is going to do nothing but empower “us against the world” mentality. What is your preference - to be able to spew hateful messages or to try and make a change? Without understanding the drivers behind what happens, you only play into the deck of those who escalate the conflict, while also supporting suffering for those who never deserved it - crucially, on both sides of the frontline.