The Kyoto global warming treaty, with its limits on emissions and growth, has emerged as an obstacle to Russia’s ambitions of doubling economic growth and becoming a world economic power.
Russia has been growing rapidly and has come a long way since the economic collapse of August 1998 — an event that shook world markets.
Encouraged by average annual growth of 7 percent that has nearly doubled Russia’s economic output since 1998, President Vladimir Putin aims to double it once again by 2012.
Under current calculations, the country’s gross domestic product is about $500 billion per year. A doubling would give Russia a $1 trillion economy — putting it in an elite club of 10 or so nations with economies that size or larger.
But by some measures, Russia’s economy already is much larger, said Pavel M. Teplukhin, president of Troika Dialog, a top Russian investment firm.
If Russia’s large underground economy were taken into account — a teeming world of millions of workers who take in cash on the side through off-the-books work to supplement their meager government salaries — the economy would look three to four times larger, he said.
That would put it in the same league as Italy or Britain, and erase any doubts about Russia’s entitlement to be in the Group of Eight club of top industrial nations.
The Russian economy would look still larger, Mr. Teplukhin said, if the value of the country’s real estate were included in the official accounts.
Amazingly enough, though Russia is by far the largest country in the world in terms of land — spanning 11 time zones — no one has assessed the actual value of its real estate, he said.
The country’s economic output would double yet again if real estate transactions were given their full value, Mr. Teplukhin said, but the government does not have money to create the army of land assessors to do that.
Should Russia ever get around to making the accounting changes Mr. Teplukhin is suggesting, it easily would surpass China, France and Britain and rival only Japan and Germany for a spot as the world’s second- or third-largest economy — at least on paper.
But on a more mundane level, Russia still faces practical obstacles to growth as it struggles to dismantle and restructure the inefficient industries and systems created under the Soviet Union, economists say.
Growth in this century has been propelled primarily by its enormous oil and gas sector, a budding information technology industry, and an ongoing boom in construction and Westernized service businesses primarily emanating out of Moscow.
The biggest hurdle, most economists agree, will be spreading the benefits of growth and Westernization to Russia’s far-flung regions, where too often little has changed since the Soviet days.
“Russia belongs in the G-8, but we have to work harder to make it a successful member of the G-8,” said Mark C. Medish, a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP and former White House special assistant on Russian affairs.
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