Why Russia’s Long-Term Economic Future Might Be Stunningly Bright

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

The Wall Street Journal headlined on August 2nd, “The West Attacked Russia’s Economy. The Result Is Another Stalemate.”, and reported IMF calculations that Russia’s real annual GDP growth has vacillated wildly since at least 2010 and averages around 1% annually throughout the 2010-2022 period and is expected to be 1.5% this year. The World Bank shows similar figures on that, but their graph of “GDP, PPP (current international $) – Russian Federation” (which is a more realistic picture that’s based on Purchasing-Power Parity) shows something remarkable about Russia’s long-term economic trajectory: that whereas throughout the 1990s, Russia’s figure remained around 1.0 (and was trending downwards), it took off upward when Putin came into power in 2000 and very steadily rose to around 5.3 in 2022 — a 430% rise during the entire 2000-2022 period; it rose worldwide from 49 to 164, which is a 235% rise during that same 22-year period. So: under Putin’s management, Russia’s economic performance has actually been much better than the economic performance of the entire world.

What Russia’s economic performance will turn out to be for the 2023 year is, of course, uncertain, and though the IMF is estimating a 1.5% GDP growth, Putin recently said that Russia is estimating a 2.5% growth for this year. WorldEconomics estimates, like the World Bank does, that Russia this year will experience PPP GDP growth of 1.5%, and that America will experience 1.8%, Germany 0%, China 5.2%, and India 6.1%.

The WSJ is neoconservative (pro-imperialism, for U.S. global hegemony), and so their article quotes only pro-U.S.-Government, anti-Russian-Government, experts, and one of them was this:

“What we’re seeing now is a massive boost in demand distribution via military-industrial complex and war beneficiaries, we can call it military Keynesianism,” said Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian central-bank official who is now a nonresident scholar at the Berlin-based Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. … Prokopenko said that while state spending on the war is currently boosting the economy, “that’s not productive growth.”

“The Russian economy is not sustainable in the long term. It all reminds of the Soviet times and we know how the Soviet economy went,” she said.

Here’s a reason why she might be inappropriately projecting from the U.S.-and-allied world — where the ‘Defense’ contractors (weapons-manufacturers mainly) are 100% privately owned-and-controlled — from that, to the Russian economy, where the firms which sell to the military are instead majority-owned (and fully controlled) by Russia’s Government itself, and therefore the incentives for Russia’s weapons-producers are not to make as much profit as possible (such as in The West) but are instead to serve the nation’s national-security needs as much as possible. It’s a very different situation. Whereas in America’s military economy the incentive is for maximum corruption in order to profit as much as possible from selling to the Government, Russia’s military economy maximally incentivizes protecting the country — not the merely private incentives.

On 27 August 2022, I headlined “Why RussChina Will Probably Be the Dominant Nation Beyond the Year 2100” and documented that in terms of natural resources Russia leads the world by far, and that in human resources China leads the world because not only of the size of its population but also because its Governmental system has increased (added to) the effectiveness of that population, so as to make China already the world’s #1 nation regarding human resources. The two nations border each other and both are strongly committed to win-win relationships with other nations, instead of the U.S.-and-allied group’s supremacist, master-slave colonialist win-lose relationships with other countries. Furthermore, unlike China’s being quite subject to natural disasters such as extreme heat and increasing floods and desertification, Russia (though it covers such a vast territory) is unusually safe against those dangers. In the long-term future, Russia’s prospects might be the brightest in the entire world; and those two countries, China and Russia, which adjoin each other, also complement each other superbly. Therefore, if they join together, then The West will hardly be able to compete effectively against that.

Even if Russia will not join in a federation with China, there is no nation in the world that would likely fare as well — or be harmed as little — under conditions of increased global warming, as Russia, because Russia’s very cold Asian two-thirds, Siberia, would then have a longer growing season, and might become the place to be, as the world is heating up. Almost everywhere else, agriculture will shrink, instead of expand.

The long-term economic prospects for Russia are enormously under-estimated. If that country will continue to have great leadership at the very top, then it could turn out to be (especially if merged with China) the world’s most successful nation. The U.S. and its allies, because of their supremacist, win-lose, orientation, are obsessed with conquering it/them — not with cooperating with them in a win-win future. That is just a wasted opportunity for the U.S. and its allies to participate in producing a better world for everyone. They don’t believe in win-win, only in win-lose. This attitude will hinder, not help, them. The leadership in The West nowadays is putrid, toxic.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.