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On January 15, 2024, “Interfax” news agency published an article about the next IMEMO annual forecast “Russia and the World” for the current year 2025. 

In the previous article, columnist Vyacheslav Terekhov paid attention to some trends in the development of the world economy and politics. This issue will cover the Russian economy, and more precisely the problems that the Russian economy faced in previous years.

Although the research collection is devoted to forecasts for the current year, in the opinion of the authors, it is impossible to make even general forecasts for 2025 without clarifying the problems inherited from the past period.

In recent years, the country has faced the main task – to move from short-term anti-crisis adaptation to the creation of prerequisites for the continuation of dynamic economic growth, at least in the medium term. This was achieved through three stages of radical economic turnaround conducted in the country.

The first stage dates back to 2022. At that time, due to a radical reorientation of foreign economic relations and the implementation of macroeconomic stabilization measures, the collapse of the Russian economy expected by the initiators of anti-Russian sanctions was avoided. The country reached a moderate GDP decline rate of 1.2 %, which was even less than the indicator of the 2020 coronavirus crisis (minus 2.7 %).

The second turnaround was in 2023, when, as a result of supporting the expansion of domestic demand by substituting imports with domestic products, the country managed to ensure strong GDP growth of 3.6 %.

To maintain the growth dynamics in 2024, the Russian economy had to find mechanisms to increase industrial output by eliminating supply-side bottlenecks. The difficulty in solving this problem was that it was necessary to take into account the already achieved level of demand.

However, as it is noted in the collection, “progress along this path turned out to be rather limited”.