The state of Russia's economy is...

May 26, 2004

Russian president Vladimir Putin is optimistic about the state of Russia's economy. BBC News: Putin predicts a surging economy during his next term:

He said his goals were a higher living standard for Russians and the pursuit of stability, democracy and Russia's strategic interests abroad.

Russia, he said, should match and even exceed other states in its development. The president predicted the economy could double by 2010 if its steady growth - 7.3% last year - continued.

Last week, The Economist published a survey on Russia and has a "cautiously optimistic" outlook: Having it both ways

What is clear is that an open economy and a closed political system make uneasy bedfellows. The overweening bureaucracy is harming business, and not just that of power-hungry magnates like Mr Khodorkovsky, but of the little people building the foundations of Russia's new economy. Encouragingly, business is fighting back, and citizens, increasingly deprived of a political voice at the top, are beginning to build democracy from the bottom up.

Daniel Drezner looks at the Economist survey and sees evidence to suggest that caution is beating optimism: Whither Russia, or when print beats the Internet

However, there is the rare moment with looking at something in print provides greater information than reading it on the Internet. This is one of those times, and that information suggests that Russia is worse off than the survey's author, Gideon Lichfield, suggests.

Why? In the print edition of the Economist, most country surveys like these are filled with advertisements from either large companies indigenous to the country in question, or large multinationals with significant amounts of foreign direct investment. Generally speaking, the number of ads is a rough indicator of the economic dynamism of the surveyed country. In February, for example, a survey of India had five full ad pages.

For this 16-page survey, there was only one half-page advertisement