Asia-Pacific

Foreign investment in Russia plunges 50% in 2010

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2011-02-18 17:33

MOSCOW - Foreign direct investment (FDI) in Russia slid significantly last year, Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Friday.

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At an economic forum in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, the minister said preliminary figures indicated FDI had fallen by 50 percent to about $12 to $14 billion.

"This (FDI) is not enough. In the best years, it reached $27 billion," Kudrin was quoted by local media as saying.

Kudrin also said Russia's industry and its gross domestic product (GDP) could rebound to the pre-global economic crisis level by the end of 2011 or the beginning of 2012.

"We hope we will reach the pre-crisis level. On the GDP front, we will reach the pre-2008 economy size at the beginning of next year," he told the forum.

The minister said Russia's GDP needed annual growth of 6-7 percent.

"We will see in the coming years a stable growth of around 4 percent and above. However, for Russia, the level of a mid-ranking economy is insufficient," Kudrin said.

"We need a significantly higher growth rate of 6-7 percent," he said.

At the end of January, the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) said Russia's GDP grew by 4 percent in 2010, higher than the latest 3.8-percent forecast.

In 2009, the Russian economy, smashed by the global economic crisis, saw its worst recession in decades, with GDP shrinking 7.9 percent.