35 years later, Academician Aganbegyan again portends trouble

The Russian economy has been in a crisis that will be “significantly deeper” than everything that the country has experienced since the late 1990s: GDP and industry will lose 10%, the poverty level will jump to levels that have not been from the first years After the collapse of the USSR. With such a disappointing forecast for Russians in an interview with Business Online, a former economy adviser Mikhail Gorbachev, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Economics Abel Aganbegyan.

According to Aganbegyan, who began his career in the Soviet Sovmin under Nikita Khrushchev, by mid-2023, the economic decline in the Russian Federation will be able to exceed the “failure” of 2014-2016. And twice – the consequences of the 1998 default, excerpts from the statements of Aganbegyan are given by the Moscow Times.

Aganbegyan predicts that the unemployment rate, including hidden, will double in the Russian Federation, and people who are already 10% after the first wave of sanctions will have to live in conditions of hard savings. “

According to him, now 18% of Russian citizens “live at a beggarly level”: their income does not reach the subsistence minimum established by the government at the level of 13,919 rubles per month. “These are people who think that to buy to eat. They cannot go into an ordinary“ five ”and pay for what they liked. They should choose food because they cannot afford to eat meat every day,” says Aganbegyan.

such, according to his assessment, will become more than one and a half times: when the crisis reaches its maximum in the third or fourth quarter, 25-30% of the population, or 43 million people, may be in the poverty zone.

In order to increase real incomes by 20%, it will take 15 trillion rubles, but the state does not have that kind of money, Aganbegyan claims: the budget loses oil and gas rents and income from non -pimples as Russian suppliers from the markets are sanctioned, and the economy accelerates fall.

In July, according to the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation, oil and gas revenues of the federal treasury sank by 26%, VAT fees – by 40%, customs revenues – almost doubled. The budget deficit amounted to a third from the size of the budget. And this is only the beginning, says Aganbegyan.

Note that Abel Aganbegyan was one of the authors of the so-called “socio-economic justification” of the withdrawal of the NKAO from the Azerbaijan SSR and its transfer to the Armenian SSR. The thesis that all the problems of the Armenian population of the NKAO precisely from the fact that the autonomous region is not in Armenia, but as part of Azerbaijan, Aganbegyan actively promoted during his foreign trips. He was one of the creators of that negative attitude of the West to Azerbaijan and to all Azerbaijani, which continues to now remain, which we were convinced during the 44-day war.