A natural reaction to external shocks: on the Rosstat data

According to data from Rosstat, the worst-case scenarios projected by experts have not come to fruition, SUM Vice Rector Ksenia Ekimova mentioned to a correspondent of the REGNUM News Agency.

‘We are obviously seeing a drop in a number of positions, but it can be easily explained by the reduced economic activity in the majority of industries.

Thus, the halt in air travel has led to a natural decrease in the performance of transport aviation (a year-on-year decrease of 14.2% in April 2019 and 12.6% in March 2020), and the halt in construction works has naturally reduced the volumes of residential construction (compared to March 2020).

Even despite this decrease, 382 multi-family residential buildings have been constructed, and 3 million square metres of residential property has been commissioned (including houses constructed by citizens themselves).

The real estate market is currently demonstrating the same trend which was formed in the food market (consumer expectations), but with the opposite value.

It’s a natural reaction to external shocks which should be resolved in the near future. Based on the fact that construction sites will open in June, with the decreased mortgage rates, the industry will most likely be able to reach the 2019 performance.

Agriculture is showing very positive results. A warm spring has led to an early sowing time. Wheat, which is a traditional export product for Russia, has been almost fully sown (as of 1 May wheat had been sown on an area of 1.2 million ha, which is 3.5 times larger than in May 2018); sugar beet, which caused a lot of disputes, has also been almost entirely sown (66.5% of fields allocated to this plant in 2019).

Processes that were kick-started by the need for import substitution have led to the fact that by 1 May 25,000 ha had been planted with vegetables, which is a 35.1% increase compared to 1 May 2019 (and a 66.6% increase compared to 1 May 2018). All of this has brought the total year-on-year increase in production volumes to 3.1% in April 2019 and 13.3% in March 2020.

Apprehensions about an explosive growth of unemployment, in my opinion, have also been so far unjustified, even given the fact that the number of unemployed people according to the ILO methodology has increased by almost 740,000 economically active citizens and reached 4.3 million people (YoY increase of 21% in April 2020 and 23.4% in March 2020), with a total number of labour resources (approx. 76 million people) and a rapid growth in the share of unofficial services, the situation is currently not critical,’

said the expert.

REGNUM News Agency previously informed that according to the data from Rosstat the performance across numerous Russian economy sectors had declined due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Source: REGNUM News Agency

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