What is to befall barrel and us?

Annual economic forum in St. Petersburg — pretentiously dubbed the “Russian Davos” — has come to an end. Neither its significance for the global economics, nor the ranks of the guests, nor the announced goals can match the Swiss ones, but peculiar aspects of it are crucial for our country.

Georgia puts up…Russian WTO membership for an auction

Mr. Lawrence Summers

Negotiations over the Russian entry into World Trade Organization have been dragging on  since 1995, which seems to be record term for that. Not a single country in the world had struggled for the membership in this international club longer than Russia. Discussion among Russian economists on whether Russia needs WTO or not is still on and will seemingly last forever. It seems, though that those who oppose it are actually right. Mutual cancellation of customs tariffs will lead to the increase of margin on traditional Russian export goods, i.e. mostly raw natural resources (oil, gas, metals and fertilizers) but due to the traditional Russian export-trade model, these profits would still never leave various „tax havens” and would never get back into country