Putin’s grand economic plan failing to deliver: Bloomberg

The grand economic plan, put forth last year as the central pledge of Putin’s re-election campaign, was supposed to turn Russia into the world’s fifth-largest economy over six years, but so far the results are far from what was expected, according to Bloomberg.

The spending plan, dubbed National Projects, set targets to be achieved by 2024 in areas ranging from social services and infrastructure to technology and ecology, Bloomberg reported.

The news agency said that Putin in early May summoned four dozen officials from across Russia to the Kremlin for a progress report to find out how the country’s most ambitious effort to raise living standards since the Soviet era was coming along.

As officials recounted their achievements, it turned out that the plan was nowhere near delivering the “decisive breakthrough” that Putin had promised, according to Bloomberg.

The news agency said that Putin’s focus on restoring Russia’s superpower status has left little time to push through the bureaucratic, legal and other reforms economists and his own advisers say are needed to spur significant growth.

One of the main goals of Putin’s six-year economic plan—details of which were revealed in a 110-page blueprint posted online in February, according to Bloomberg—is to massively increase Russia’s gross domestic product per capita by the middle of the next decade, the news agency noted.

But in reality Russia’s economy is expanding less than 1 percent a year, amid continuing sanctions and a lack of reforms, Bloomberg said.

The news agency reported that the average Russian worker is now poorer than they were before the West first imposed sanctions on the country five years ago.

Penalties were imposed after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

Much of the first year of Putin’s centerpiece has been lost to internal wrangling over which big-ticket projects to pursue, Bloomberg reported.

(gs/pk)

Source: forbes.pl, Bloomberg