Paul Goble
Staunton,
September 3 – To much fanfare, Rosstat, the Russian government’s statistical
arm, has begun to use international accounting rules for defining the country’s
GDP; but it has significantly reduced their value by classifying not only military
spending but also spending on dual use technologies.
These
two categories of spending currently amount to approximately 4.7 percent of
Russia’s GDP, according to RBC journalists Ivan Tkachov and Olga Ageyeva, who
come up with that figure by subtracting the total of all public categories from
the overall total which is also public (rbc.ru/economics/03/09/2018/5b87cd299a7947da99b885f0?from=newsfeed).
Using that method,
they suggest that Moscow is now spending 4.1 trillion rubles (60 billion US
dollars) on defense acquisition and development this year but note that the
failure of Rosstat to publish data on these line items reduces the ability of
analysts to determine what is going on and means that political figures often
give out misleading information.
The decision not to publish either
data set, of course, did not originate with Rosstat, Yevgeny Nadorshin, an
economist at PF Capital, says. It came from the defense ministry, and there is
no chance now that anyone will be able to reverse it.
Vasiliy Zatsepin, a specialist on
military economics at the Gaidar Institute, says that the failure of the
government to publish such data leads to a lack of transparency and ineffective
spending. “It is senseless to classify purchases and prices,” he continues. “This
only creates major problems in the administration of the defense sector and is
counter-productive.”
According to him, “complete,
adequate, and timely statistics and simply a necessity if we want to understand
economic processes and take correct decisions and develop the country.” Unfortunately, the expanded classification of
spending “deprives experts of what they need for analysis and means politicians
and officials are giving out numbers unconnected with reality.”
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