“We are now experiencing the lowest inflation in 20 years: 3.8% for the first four months of the year. It's clear that this is very important and beneficial for encouraging investment and increasing lending, especially long-term lending. More importantly, low inflation allows us not only to maintain people's real incomes, but steadily increase them. Today we see an upward trend in key economic indices. Russia's GDP is expected to grow by 3.5%-4% in 2010, according to the forecast of the Ministry of Economic Development. There are even more optimistic scenarios, but we will proceed from that conservative estimate. Russian industry performed extremely well in April, posting double-digit growth, 10.4%, for the first time.”
“Starting in July 2009, the Russian economy has shown increasingly steady signs of recovery. According to official government forecasts, in 2010, GDP is slated to increase 3.1%. Nevertheless, there is a high probability that the growth rate will be higher. The preliminary results of the first quarter of 2010 inspire optimism. Growth in industrial production was 5.8% and real income increased 7.4%. All of this enables us to say that the recession is over in our economy. More importantly, we have very good starting conditions for further progress.”
“The economy showed clear signs of improvement during the second half of last year. GDP and industrial production began growing again, and there have been some signs of recovery in investment.”
“Traditionally Russia has had a large foreign trade surplus: at the end of 2009 it will be about $100 billion. Foreign investment is flowing in, the national currency, the rouble, is growing stronger and our sovereign wealth fund has now reached more than $447 billion.”
“Positive trends are apparent in Russia too. Since June 2009 the GDP has been growing month on month and investment demand and retail trade have been gradually recovering. The macro-economic situation remains stable, inflation in the country is set to be at one of its lowest rates since 1992, certainly under 10%, and I think it my be 9%.”
"The economy has been growing in the past five months. The growth is modest, an average of 0.5% a month, and some months even lower, 0.3%. Some months the economy grew by 0.8%, but on average the economy has been growing by 0.5% for the past five months. I very much hope that these positive figures will grow by the middle of next year."
"We are restoring our gold and currency reserves. Today they are the third largest in the world after the People's Republic of China and Japan and amount to $444 billion. We have a trade surplus, and we will probably have the best indicator in this area. We have a positive trade balance, probably the best figure. We did well in 2006, and the inflation rate is likely to be lower this year. It will be lower than 10% this year, probably even one-digit figure, around 9%. This means that we have coped with these problems."
"We see the average wage falling; it is down 3.6%. Why? Because the fall in the commercial sector was considerable, 5.6%, I think. The influence on the public sector became evident in 2009 because the wage fund in the sector was increased in December 2008, and so wages in that sector increased by 4.1%. We have increased pensions considerably, by 13%-14%."
"In the sectors that the Government considers to be its direct sphere of responsibility the situation is more or less acceptable. For instance, industry, as I said, is expected to contract by 13%, but the defence industry will grow by 3.7%. And in some areas, for example in aerospace, they have many problems too and we were recently looking at this industry - but they have a growth of 13%."
"What has been done during this difficult year, I would say, first, that it was one of the most difficult years in the past decade - not only for us, but for the world economy in general. These events have hit us hard. We had predicted (though no official forecasts were made), some experts believed that GDP in Russia would drop by about 10%. It has dropped significantly, but not as much as some experts had thought. It is likely to be 8.5-8.7%. That is a lot."
