Der russischen Wirtschaft geht es viel schlechter, als es den Anschein hat, und „die Eliten sind zunehmend alarmiert“, da alternative BIP-Maßstäbe einen enormen Rückgang anzeigen
https://fortune.com/2026/05/24/russian-economy-gdp-contraction-inflation-oil-prices-ukraine-war-elites-financial-crisis/?utm_source=reddit/
2 Kommentare
The Swedish government has come up with some drastically different economic figures on Russia that make the Kremlin’s official data seem like a Potemkin village.
In a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard cautioned the West against overestimating Russia and said the economy is more fragile than it appears.
While Russia has claimed GDP expanded by about 13% between 2020 and 2024, Sweden’s analysis of nighttime luminosity suggests the economy actually shrank by 8% during that span.
Moscow has also lowballed inflation substantially, according to Stenergard, who pointed out that Russia’s official inflation figure in 2024 was 10% while the central bank hiked interest rates to 21% that year.
Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: [https://fortune.com/2026/05/24/russian-economy-gdp-contraction-inflation-oil-prices-ukraine-war-elites-financial-crisis/?utm_source=reddit/](https://fortune.com/2026/05/24/russian-economy-gdp-contraction-inflation-oil-prices-ukraine-war-elites-financial-crisis/?utm_source=reddit/)
I mean, I don’t doubt that Russian officials have a strong incentive to overstate economic growth, and I haven’t read the original research (don’t know where to find it, anyone got a link?), but wouldn’t increasing energy prices since the Iran war be a major confounder here?
I imagine that when people spend less on „nighttime luminosity“ (energy), this either means people have less to spend on energy, or energy prices have increased. I’m quite certain energy prices have increased a lot recently, so can we be certain that a decline in nighttime luminosity correlates to a decline in GDP in this case? Has nighttime luminosity in Russia declined that much more than in other countries? I imagine this very well may be the case, and maybe the original research accounts for this, but just from reading the article I’m not sure how solid the proxy is in recent months.
Edit: upon reading again I see the analysis runs from 2020-2024, so the Iran war wouldn’t be relevant here, but global energy prices still increased dramatically during this period, so the main point still stands.