8 Jun 2009

Long Road to Recovery


After a long search through various resources (as well as some number crunching of my own), I finally found some summarized figures on the effect of the economic transition on Post-Soviet states.

The above graph is based on numbers from the UN Statistics Division (admittedly the wiki-user didn't specify if GDP is in current or constant dollars, or is adjusted for PPP - and I'm not even sure how the UN calculated any GDP for the USSR, since I believe the Soviets did not keep such records). I'm a little suspicious of the late 1980's spurt in Soviet economic output - I thought that this period showed stagnation, followed by the chaos of perestroika. If Soviet GDP was more stagnant, then the change between 1990 and 1991 isn't so abrupt (which leads me to believe that these figures are in current prices after all). There are further IMF numbers in the sub-article that are also illuminating. Needless to say, things were bad.

In any case, it looks like in toto the former Soviet states only just reached their 1990 output levels in the past couple years. And considering that most of their recovery has been based on either resource extraction and/or foriegn-denominated loans, I'm sure the world recession is hurting them all quite badly. Apparently Russia's recession rivals its downturns in the early 90s and in 1998.

UPDATE: I double-checked and the GDP figures cited in the graph are indeed in current prices.

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