The conventional wisdom seems to be that Russia, due to its strong macroeconomic fundamentals and relative isolation from the world economy, will weather the oncoming credit crisis well. In fact, Kudrin (the Finance Minister) suggested ‘Russia and other countries with large gold and currency reserves can…can support the global economy by flexing the financial might of their sovereign funds’, insisting that Russia remains a ‘haven’ of stability amid global financial crisis. This is a sentiment shared by Russia’s senior executives, 73% of whom are ‘very confident’ of revenue growth in 2008 (up from 35% last year). CEO’s from Brazil (63%), India (90%) and China (73%) also feel confident, in contrast to most Western businesspeople, e.g. the US (36%), Japan (31%) and Italy (19%) – who are much less confident than a year ago.
Flextronics and Peugeot plan to build plants in Russia, while Russia is going to build a railway in Saudi Arabia and a hydropower station in Tajikistan. The Russian search engine Yandex enters the world’s top ten, with 566 million searches, or 0.9% of the world’s search requests. Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus are to expand the role of the Eurasian Economic Community by signing nine treaties to draw up a regulatory framework for the Customs Union.
