Difference in Regional Development Gets Bigger
The economic growth isn’t uniform in Russia, signaled statistics that Rosstat released in late past week. The H1 industrial production went down in 12 regions of the country, including Ingushetia (down 27 percent), Kalmykia (20.5 percent), Sakhalin (10.7 percent) and Tyva (7.7 percent). At the same time, Chukotka manifested the strongest growth of 84 percent, Kaluga region benefited from 34.4 percent, Bryansk region had 28.3 percent and Adygei posted 24.8 percent. Russia’s average indicator was 5.8 percent.
The lack of uniformity is evident when it comes to the federal districts. Here, the half-year leader was the Central District, while the Far East’s industry had the zero growth. The evident trend is that the pace of extraction regions is behind the relatively poor but booming southern part of Russia and the Volga region. There are two reasons for this performance. On the one hand, it could be attributed to the catching-up development and the low-base effect, on the other hand, it's the general stagnation of extractive industries, particularly the crude oil.
Bringing momentum to mining operations usually calls for large-scale investments; the rates of their growth were just 15.4 percent, i.e. below Russia’s average in all extractive regions except Siberia. In line with all economic theories, Siberia that benefited from investment surge of 19.6 percent posted the industrial growth of 7.4 percent.
Of interest is that Moscow and the Moscow region might soon suffer from the slowdown. The investments narrowed 1.2 percent and 1.3 percent respectively in the first half of the year. But in those regions, the key engine of economic growth isn’t the industry but rather the services, especially the financial ones.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Sep. 16, 2008
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